From his article: “Imperial and Urban Art in Islam: The Subject Matter of Fatimid Art”, Colloque International sur l‘Histoire du Caire (Cairo, 1969) 173-189

• For a century or so (from midC10th to midC11th) the only strong & purposeful force in Islam was Fatimid Egypt, and probably therefore the place to which artists & artisans came from all over, ie. a creative centre with an impact throughout the dar al-islam

• The peculiarity of Fatimid art in the C11th is that it becomes more figural; in Grabar’s words, “subject matter with living beings makes its appearance in all media” (p.175) – the crucial questions are why, how and when did the introduction of the new subject matter take place?

• He investigates this by a long study of the (lustre) ceramics of this period: ‘open’ shapes (ie. plates, bowls) predominate over ‘closed’ shapes (ie. jugs), purpose of which is the emphasis on design; 3 main groups of decoration: i) calligraphy, ii) animals, iii) people – the first 2 can be related to other Islamic traditions (Abbasid) and are explicable as symbols of well-wishing; the 3rd can be subdivided into a) scenes from the ‘princely cycle’ (representing the ‘good life’) & b) narrative scenes (men wrestling etc)

• Stylistically in these ceramics there is a new “realism” (what Grabar calls ‘the spatial tendency’) ie. the use of contour lines to represent curves of the body, contrast of light and dark areas
  
• In the surviving woodwork he says there is a similar tendency towards “liveliness of individual motifs” and an “expanded vocabulary of themes” (p.181): this can be dated to the mid C11th when the Caliph al-Mustansir renovated the Western Palace (wooden friezes from this palace were reused in the maristan of the Mamluk Sultan Qala’un immediately after the Fatimid period)

• Further comparison with rock crystal & ivory objects which are the 2 most expensive techniques: in these we can see that i) the early Fatimid period is characterised by large imperial objects with precise epigraphic identification of the persons for whom they were made, whereas ii) the later Fatimid period is characterised by smaller, anonymous objects (p.182).

   

  He draws 2 conclusions from a survey of the material evidence:

• These conclusions lead to his hypothesis (p.183):
  

  “that there occurred in the middle of the C11th a change in taste or in some other aspect of life likely to affect the arts, which led to major modifications in the ways in which expensive materials were used and also to the spread to all media of figurative themes hitherto primarily limited to the more expensive [media]”.

• Needless to say he thinks the event which stimulated this “change” was the dispersal of the Fatimid Treasury: for the first time a private palace environment was visible to all, & what was manifested was an “international or intra-cultural art common to the great empires” (p.184); this created i) an influx of new objects and new artistic themes which were translated into more common techniques/media, & ii) the impetus for innovation

• Egypt at this time was uniquely receptive to this new impetus, since we know from the Geniza documents that only in Egypt did there exist a “developed middle class of Muslim, Christian & Jewish tradesmen and artisans… who had the economic means to acquire or to order for themselves objects with new & sophisticated themes” (p.185); Grabar dubs this mercantile group the “urban bourgeoisie” who “transformed the international art of princes into a locally Egyptian version of Islamic art” (thus it should not be surprising that Christian themes occur in the iconography of Fatimid lustre)

• In summary, what created the originality of Fatimid art was the predominance taken by an urban Egyptian, Cairene taste in the 2nd half of the C11th (p.186).