According to The Grove Dictionary of Art (1996), iconography is “is potentially applicable to works from any given period, and thus forms one of the most fundamental branches of research in the history of art”. Originated in the 19th-century classificatory investigation of the subject matter in the arts, this methodology was also applied for non-western art fields, such as Islamic art (Richard Ettinghausen [1906-1976] was the forerunner of descriptive and interpretive image reading in the arts of Islam). Old-fashioned as it may appear to be, iconography remains one of the principal research disciplines in the study of visual culture in the Islamic world, especially in medieval times. Regardless of religious or secular, motifs derived from humans, nature, animals and mythical creatures and their complex allegories continue to amuse the eyes of art historians and the general public alike.

Among the rich iconographic idioms that evolved in Islamic visual culture, the dragon is one of the most enchanting and laborious themes of investigation. Because of its rich symbolic significance and its versatile forms, many art historians have challenged to retell a connected story of this universal mythical creature in the past. Yes these challenges did not easily result in happy endings. The preface of Of Serpents and Dragons in Islamic Art: An Iconographical Study (published in 2011 but based on Abbas Daneshvari's Yarshater lectures given to the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, in December 2004) states that “the book has been more than fifteen years in the making. I have abandoned the task and returned to it often. Sometimes with new enthusiasm and new perspectives but also a failed memory of my earlier insights” (p. ix). This is exactly how researchers are destined to experience the iconographic study of the dragon in Islamic art; the subject generates endless scholarly fascination, resulting uncertainty, dilemma and exhaustion but, after all, a sense of immense satisfaction and accomplishment.

The publication of The Dragon in Medieval East Christian and Islamic Art, which was timed to coincide with the publication of Daneshvari's Of Serpents and Dragons, is not only a welcome addition to the series of studies in Islamic dragons—one may also think of the works such as Curatora's Draghi: la Tradizione Artistica Orientale e i Disegni del Tesoro del Topkapï (Venice, 1989), Titley's Dragons in Persian, Mughal and Turkish Art (London, 1981) and Gierlich's Drache·Phönix·Doppeladler: Fabelwesen in der islamischen Kunst (Berlin, 1993). It also makes an ambitious attempt to compose an ultimate corpus of dragon imagery in the medieval art of Islam and related cultures. Having spent a decade gathering data, Kuehn's aim is certainly achieved.

The study concentrates on the manifestation of the dragon in a broadly defined “medieval East Christian and Islamic world” before the appearance of the Chinese style dragon in the arts of Islam from the late thirteenth century onwards. Kuehn could have enjoyed the indulgence of scholarship as far as the dragon could go across vast swathes of space and time, yet she wisely knew how to set her limits. She made a sensible decision not to embark on the Chinese-style dragon in Islamic art after the Mongols in this monograph, as this would require another decade (or century) of investigation, including yet another arduous task of gathering all the data of dragon imagery in East Asian traditions.

The Dragon in Medieval East Christian and Islamic Art sets out its long journey into the manifold histories of dragon iconography in the medieval Islamic world. In order to grasp the essence of iconographically defined “medieval Islamic” or more conventionally known “Saljuq” dragon, the study intends to identify dragon imagery in medieval Central Asia or Irano-Turkic territories and its transmission into Anatolia. Kuehn explores multiple roles of the dragon—its royal, heroic and mystical associations, as well as its scientific, magical or talismanic significance—in cross-media contexts, encompassing architectural decoration, portable objects and manuscript painting.

The sheer mass of data Kuehn has managed to assemble is truly amazing: as the dragon was widely shared among disparate cultural traditions in the Western part of Eurasia, such as those of the Arabs, Persians, Turks, Byzantines, Armenians, Syriacs, Georgians and Christians, The Dragon in Medieval East Christian and Islamic Art follow this circuitous multicultural, multilingual path. With the wealth of visual and textural sources that cover a wide range of cultures, each of fourteen chapters (divided into five sections: introduction; the dragon and the natural world; the dragon and its royal and heroic associations; the dragon in astrology, alchemy, medicine and magic; the dragon as mystical metaphor) is overwhelmingly dense in discussion and references. Yet this study does not intend to offer a catalogue-raisonné-style list of dragon-shaped objects and images, nor does it aim at the definition of one single character of the dragon. It succeeds in tracing its historical development and regional variation in a holistic way, whereas it gives any readers an opportunity to search their visual and textual memory for this imaginative creature and simply to enjoy an array of some hundreds of dragon images.

Unlike other Islamic art books published by Brill, The Dragon in Medieval East Christian and Islamic Art is generous in terms of the size of the format (A4 size) and luxurious in terms of the number of illustrations (in total 198 black-and-white and colour illustrations in 92 plates). It also has a visually pleasing jacket design (detail of a candlestick base from the thirteenth century Jazira region in northern Iraq) against the red background.

In sum, it is in every reader's mind no doubt that The Dragon in Medieval East Christian and Islamic Art deserves to be seen as THE book of the dragon in early and medieval Islamic art, and it will remain a must-be-consulted tool for searching reliable references on the iconography of Islamic art in general but the dragon in particular. The publication of her next magnum opus on the iconography of a particular motif in Islamic art, namely on the angel, is eagerly awaited.