Islamic miniature paintings have historically been produced as both illustrations for books and as discrete works intended to be kept in an album. The techniques used in their making share similarities with the Byzantine tradition of miniature painting, and have recently shown up in some contemporary artists' work as well--including Shahzia Sikander's. For the Privileged Few is published on the occasion of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art's thorough Islamic miniature exhibition, spanning from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries, which originated at The David Collection in Copenhagen--famed for its important selection of Islamic art. With 185 full-color images, most of them plates, this volume is an important addition to the existing scholarship on the subject. Text by David Collection Director Kjeld von Folsach explains the primacy of this group of artworks--which includes both book illustrations and discrete paintings from the last 800 years.