Margin mania!
At the Sakıp Sabancı Museum, a display of the evolution of margins, lappets and borders with changing tastes.
My trip to Turkey in June 2023 proved to be remarkably inspiring. The Sakıp Sabancı Museum, a private fine art museum in Istanbul on the banks of the Bosphorus Strait, has a collection of ancient Ottoman Qurans. For us nerds, an infographic explains the graphic design changes that the Quran underwent over the centuries. I spent more time on this infographic than on any other exhibit.
For a young designer who always (yes, always) struggles with defining page margins, seeing margins adorned with ornaments surrounding the body text in structured layers was nothing short of awe-inducing admiration. These margin elements retain the basic focus on the body text and make contemporary margins look shamelessly naked!
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Below, I would like to share what about these pages really struck me.
The opening spread
The earliest Ottoman Korans have an illuminated opening spread called a serlevha (these are the spreads discussed in this article). The decoration of the opening spreads varied between the 15th and 19th centuries, reflecting the styles of the different periods.
Straight borders were the dominant form of decoration in the earlier examples. Later, however, lappets were added to the long side and sometimes to all three sides, and lobes animated the outlines of the lappets and borders filled with bouquets of flowers. Later periods saw the softening of the outlines, while the inscribed panels were embellished with long-leaved flowers in vases.
- Uncoloured: Margins and marginal darts: adding direction
- Purple: Lappet
- Orange: Inner border
- Indigo: Headpiece illumination
- Pale blue: Koltuk (panels reserved for illumination at either side of the text)
- Yellow: Space reserved for inscription
Number of borders
I think I am intimidated by their level of detail. Who is willing to compete with 5 levels of borders? Each with a different style, shape, colour and detail.
Colours
The page uses only gold and cobalt blue (and I am guessing a little bit of some kind of brown).
Containers
I perceived these components as ‘containers’ of the sacred text in the middle. Like blankets wrapped around the content. Won’t that be an interesting way to approach margins? Normally, to emphasise, we use blank space. But here that same space is used heavily to achieve the same emphasis. The visual texture of the ‘container’ and the ‘contained’ is evidently different — the text looks different than the ornamentation.
Visual texture
Continuing from before, there is so much visual texture in these spreads.
In the end…
There is so much more that can be interpreted from these spreads. I have not looked very deeply into these designs, not yet. Maybe someday I will. For now, this is a passing moment of inspiration and appreciation.
