One afternoon last November, Joe Lucia and the 11 other students in the Islamic Art and Architecture course met in a drab corner of the ground floor of the Walsh Library, the inconspicuous home of the University Archives at Seton Hall University.

A few months earlier, rare books historian Todor Petev had discovered two boxes there, each holding about 20 loose pages from old Islamic manuscripts. Petev selected half that he found particularly interesting — for their age, place of origin, or religious significance — and it was these that his students had come to see. For the ever-curious Lucia, now a junior, the ancient leaves would lead to some remarkable discoveries, and a taste for life as an art historian.

The group sat at tables in the conference room, surrounded by iron busts, ornately framed maps, and carts of dusty books. The students delicately thumbed through the two boxes, marveling at the faded script from a 12th-century copy of the Qur’an and the torn edges of a 19th-century Arabic text about hygiene.

A 3-by-6 inch piece of glazed linen stood apart from the other items. It was the only leaf that showed not just text, but also an illuminated illustration: seven people gathered on a lush hill. On the opposite side of the print were a dozen black and gold lines of script.

This page, like the others in the boxes, had been bequeathed to Seton Hall in 2001 by Herbert Kraft, an anthropologist, collector, and the University’s first archivist. It came with a typed description card, probably written by the dealer from whom Kraft bought the piece. The label read simply:  “Persian miniature painting of the 17th century.”

Lucia decided to investigate the origin and meaning of the piece as the topic of his final paper for the course. He had just six weeks before the deadline.

He scrutinized the leaf during several additional trips to the Archives and poured over digital close-ups from his desk in Xavier Hall. The first things he noticed were a few small gray splotches of paint. Holding the page up to the light, he saw that the smudges covered squiggly lines that looked like Persian script. Lucia figured that someone had tried to cover up the fact that the picture had been painted over text.

“If Joe had examined just a reproduction of the miniature, he would not have seen any of that,” says Petev, who used to work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. To verify where and when the leaf had been painted, Lucia next looked for similar works in books of Islamic art.

What he found was entirely unexpected.

..Read the rest of my latest profile in Seton Hall Magazine