The work of Louis Adrien Berbrugger (1801–69) is the first comprehensive study of monuments in Algeria. Published in 1843 and dedicated to King Louis Philippe I of France, in addition to monuments, it illustrates maps and plans as well as inscriptions and Algerian coins.

Félix Marie Charles Texier was a French historian, architect and archaeologist who published a number of significant works about his travels throughout Asia Minor and the Middle East. Many Westerners were travelling to the East at the time, not only as tourists, but also to research its religious, artistic, architectural and archaeological history.

The architect and designer Owen Jones’ influential designs brought together different cultural styles. He illustrated objects from international tours and exhibitions and, at the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace in London in 1851 for example, he re-created the Lion Fountain of the Alhambra Palace and decorated the building dedicated to this masterwork of art.

In his study into the origins of blazons and fleurs-de-lys, the designer Adalbert de Beaumont examines the period of the Mamluks and recognises the contribution blazons, seen in the iconography on works of art, made to heraldry.

Europeans in the Middle East prompted the study of Islamic architecture. Visitors recorded sites in paintings or, later, with the use of photography.

The casket, once part of the Cathedral Treasury, was donated by the Dean of León Cathedral to the National Museum of Archaeology, Madrid, in 1869. It is an example of the importance of Arab workshops and works of art in the Iberian Peninsula during the Middle Ages.

Knowledge about the Alhambra Palace included artifacts associated with it – such as this lamp from the Alhambra Mosque. The most important pieces from Islamic Spain, held in the National Archaeological Museum, Madrid, were selected for publication and thus helped to develop Islamic art and archaeology as an academic discipline.

Illustration from the book Kunst und Kunstgewerbe auf der Wiener Weltausstellung 1873, by the German art historian Karl von Lützow.

Such vases are known as “Alhambra vases” and are considered masterpieces of Islamic art. As these vases are extremely rare, only a small number have become part of museum collections, for example, at the Alhambra Museum and the National Archeological Museum.

Illustration from the book Kunst und Kunstgewerbe auf der Wiener Weltausstellung 1873, by the German art historian Karl von Lützow.

The Iberian Peninsula has a rich Arab heritage, which was “rediscovered” during the 18th century. Works of art, monuments and some written sources were all brought together in publications by the National Museum of Archaeology. Acquisition, exhibition and publication of these artworks are acknowledgements of their importance.

The illustration is from the publication Ornaments Turcs by the potter Eugène Collinot and the designer Adalbert de Beaumont. Their record of ornamental designs, published in 1859, played an important role in Europe’s familiarisation with Islamic art.

This book, by Rafael Contreras, conservator of the Alhambra Palace, published in 1885, gave new light to the monuments built between the 10th and the 14th centuries in al-Andalus (Andalucia) as part of the Arab past.

The scholar Stanley Lane-Poole (1854–1931) worked for the British Museum in London. He visited Egypt in the 1880s, and then, in 1886, wrote an introduction to Egyptian art and architecture entitled The Art of the Saracens in Egypt. He later became a professor of Arabic studies at Dublin University.

Max van Berchem (1863–1921) was a Swiss scholar of epigraphy, who studied inscriptions in Egypt, Palestine and Syria. His published works are considered invaluable for research of the period and later. His main published work is the three-volume Corpus Inscriptionum Arabicarum (c.1903).

Exterior view of Qusayr ‘Amra, a Umayyad palace in the Jordanian desert, and a focal point for the study of the Umayyad caliphs.

The National Museum of Archaeology in Madrid was founded in 1867. Its first galleries included pieces from the Islamic period of the Iberian Peninsula. From 1895 to 1936 the museum had an “Arab courtyard” where the most important artworks from the Arab past of the country were exhibited, including a copy of the Lion Fountain from the Alhambra Palace.

Alois Musil (1868–1944) was a geographer and Arabist who visited Qusayr ‘Amra in Jordan and studied its rich, painted decoration. His study was published in 1907 with drawings by the Viennese artist Alphons Leopold Mielich. Musil’s work made a significant contribution to our understanding of the early figurative art of the Umayyad period.

The façade of the Umayyad-period Qasr al-Mushatta, is a key work of early Islamic art and a prime example of shared heritage. Given as gift by the Ottoman Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid II to Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany, the gesture was seminal to the establishment of the Department of Islamic Art at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum by Wilhelm von Bode in 1904.

A most important group of objects came from excavations at Samarra between 1911 and 1913, led by the archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld and the artist, historian and director of the Islamic Art Museum in Berlin, Friedrich Sarre. The study of Samarra, the temporal capital of the Abbasids, has contributed to our understanding of developments and changes in Islamic art at that time.