Mosque Dome Interior -- Islamic Geometric Ceiling Looking Up HD Wallpaper

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Look up. Inside the great mosques of the Islamic world, looking straight up at the dome ceiling is one of the most extraordinary visual experiences available to any traveler on earth -- and this HD wallpaper captures that experience in full geometric glory. The dome ceiling radiates outward from a central medallion in rings of intricate Islamic geometric patterns, the blues and golds and turquoises and reds of hand-painted geometric tiles creating a visual mandala of breathtaking complexity. The dome is the supreme achievement of Islamic architecture -- a problem of spanning large spaces solved through a succession of innovations from the simple Roman dome through the pendentive systems of Byzantine architecture and into the muqarnas (honeycomb vaulting), ribbed domes, and double-shell constructions of the Islamic golden age. The interior surfaces of Islamic domes are almost always decorated with the full vocabulary of Islamic sacred geometry -- because the dome ceiling is understood as a representation of the celestial vault, the sky of paradise. Looking up at a decorated mosque dome is meant to give the worshipper a glimpse of heaven. The great domes of the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque in Isfahan, and the Hassan II Mosque in Casablanca each create this effect through slightly different geometric vocabularies, but all aspire to the same spiritual goal: to lift the eyes and the soul upward. Free HD download.

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