Find in Library

The German art historian Friedrich Sarre (1865-1945) is best known as the director, from 1925-31, of the Islamic collection of the Berlin Museums, and for his collaboration with Ernst Herzfeld on the excavation of the Abbasid palaces of Samarra, Iraq, just before the onset of the 1914-18 war. From a historiographical point of view, however, Sarre also deserves attention for his work on the Seljuk architecture of Anatolia, a subject that had been barely studied within the context of Islamic art when he ventured into it. Crucially, Sarre’s study of Seljuk architecture is rooted in the late nineteenth-century appreciation of Persian art, rather in the later focus on a unified Turkish identity that became pervasive in the late 1920s, following ideological shifts after the foundation of the Republic of Turkey.