Through close studies of ceramics, metalwares and other plastic arts from the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, Arts of Allusion reveals the object as a crucial site where pre-modern craftsmen of the eastern Mediterranean and Persianate realms engaged in fertile dialogue with poetry, literature, painting, and--most strikingly--architecture. At last, the book that this subject most needs: an intelligent and learned study which takes our understanding of the Islamic art object far beyond the usual simplistic 'symbolic interpretation' of their ornament. To truly experience mediaeval objects we have to engage with all the physical and intellectual processes of making: not just what they 'look like', but how they engage with all the senses, and how it is above all in reference to architecture, to literature and to philosophy that their power and meaning are to be found.