Abstract
Banten Sultanate was an Islamic kingdom in the western part of Java island, and one of important international port in the 15 th through 19 th century. There were different cultures interacted in Banten, such as from the European, Chinese, Indians, and merchant from Muslim-dominant areas such as Middle East. As a cosmopolitan, the illustrations of one of its historical manuscripts, Sajarah Banten KBG 183 would have distinct visual characteristics. This paper would try to find those characteristics by applying compositional analysis to observe their compositional, technological, and productional modalities. Later, semiotic method would be applied to scrutinize the signs used in the visualization of Sajarah Banten illustrations. The result showed that the illustrations characteristically used firm technical lines and minimalistic colors. The story characters were not drawn and only represented by objects alluding to their positions or activities. These visual characteristics were likely influenced by Islamic art aesthetics of aniconism and European technical drawings of 19 th century. Keywords: Banten, illustration, manuscript, visual characteristics. DOI: 10.7176/ADS/89-04 Publication date: January 31 st 2021
Highlights
The Sultanate of Banten was one of the Islamic kingdoms on the western part of Java, founded by Syarif Hidayatullah or Sunan Gunung Jati (1448-1568) and his son Hasanudin
The Sajarah Banten KBG 183 manuscript was written in Pegon alphabets, which were Arabic alphabets adapted for Javanese language, with total 87 pages (Pudjiastuti, 2010)
The illustrations of Sajarah Banten KBG 183 were characterized by minimalist usage of three ink colors, which were black, mainly for text, objects outline, and to substitute for blue color value in Dutch flag illustrations; purple, especially to replace the value of red color for Dutch flag illustrations; and yellow, which provided www.iiste.org contrasting combination visually with the black and purple
Summary
The Sultanate of Banten was one of the Islamic kingdoms on the western part of Java, founded by Syarif Hidayatullah or Sunan Gunung Jati (1448-1568) and his son Hasanudin. Banten Sultanate’s unique mixtures of both coastal-cosmopolitan and indigenous culture, blanketed by Islamic teachings gave birth to distinct visual characteristics found in one of the manuscripts depicting the history of the sultanate, Sajarah Banten. Among those 29 manuscripts only one of them containing illustrations, which is Sajarah Banten in Indonesian National Library collection coded KBG 183.
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