Persian Miniature Painting
The Ilkhanid reign (1256–1353).
Art Capitals during the Ilkhanid period were Tabriz (Iran) and Baghdad (Iraq). The main genres for artistic expression in Medieval Persia were illumination of religious manuscripts and illustration of secular, scientific and poetic texts. The Mongol heritage introduced Chinese-influenced motifs such as dragons, bodhisattvas, attention to clouds, long tree roots in the forefront, lotuses and peonies.
Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh (ca. 977–1010 CE) is an epic poem of the history of pre-Islamic Persia, composed of 62 stories, 990 chapters and 50,000 rhyming couplets (per- masnavi, ar-mathnawi). Just so you know, 50k (I would need another 20 posts to dwelve into the details and specificities of medieval Persian poetic style and linguistic pirouettes and codified couplets, so I am summing up here for you) is the very next after the next level of awesomeness. No one has beaten his record still.
The Shahnameh can be split in three major parts: the mythical, the heroic, and the historical. It is a recollection of folklore and documented events that combined make up the Iranian cultural identity and is a continuation of the ancient tradition of storytelling in the Near East.
As such, the Shahnameh served as an official history of lineage of rule, telling the legends of the kings and heroes, the achievements of Rustam, his complicated relationship (to say the least) with his son Suhrab, his archenemy Afrosiyob, the opposition between Iran and Turan (the epic battle), the era of Alexander the Great and more.
From this perspective, the Ilkhanids appropriated the Shahnameh, ordering illustrations of the characters in the Mongol stylistic and presented the Great Mongol Shahnama as an official dynastic history in which the Ilkhanids identified themselves with kings and heroes of the Iranian past, and in this way, legitimised their succession to power.
The Mongols surprised everyone with the unprecedented use of high-quality paper, the richness of illumination, the refinement of calligraphy, and the blossoming of illustration that Iran and Iraq witnessed during the Ilkhanid period. Ahmad Musa’s career flourished under the patronage of Abū Saʿīd, the last of the Mongol sultans. He illustrated a Kalila wa Dimna (classical book of animal fables) and a book of the Meʿrāǰ-nāma (the miraculous journey of the Prophet Muhammad), folios of which were safely kept in the “Conqueror’s Albums” of the imperial Ottoman library at the Topkapı Palace at Istanbul. Aḥmad Mūsā also came to be the mentor of Shams al-Dīn, another legendary miniature painter, who served at the court of the Jalāyir sultans of Baghdad in the latter part of the 14th century.
The Timurid reign (1370–1507).
Under the Timurids, Persian miniature painting evolved into more elaborate compositions, with more perspective, allowing to represent several scenes happening at the same time in one picture, whereas before it was one scene per picture. The Timurid dynasty started with Tamerlane (Timur the Lame — for his injured leg), who remains one of the most spoken about Timurid in Central Asia, along with Babur, who fled to India and founded his Mughal Empire in 1526. Under Tamerlane, the Empire spread from modern-day Turkey, Syria to North of India and a part of Xinjiang (in the west of China).
Under Tamerlane, Samarkand was the capital of the Timurid Empire, and the city being the center of high quality paper-making at the time, Timurid miniature artists started painting on paper, as opposed to parchments as their predecessors did. Timur and his descendants can be now characterised as patrons of art. Seeing arts and culture as one of the most effective tools of soft power, Timur brought the most promising artists and craftsmen from all the territories he had conquered to his capital in Samarkand. Metalwork and architecture also flourished under Timur, with the beautiful mosques and mausoleums made of turquoise blue tile, the Afghan lapis lazuli, with linear and geometric patterns.
With regards to the Art of the Book, the main school in the early years of the Timurid rule was the school of Shiraz. This was when a system of perspectives was introduced. Solid-colour backgrounds were replaced with landscapes, which were depicted in bold shapes and colors, dominantly pale blue, pink, white and grey. Characters depicted were fewer. At the same time, they were now elongated and stylised in pose and gesture. Yet, their faces remained expressionless and uniform.
When Tamerlane’s son (one of four), Shah Rukh, came to power, his wife Gaukharshod Begum encouraged him to move the capital to Herat, where they founded the new centre of miniature painting and calligraphy, the Herat school. Gaukharshod had lavish tastes, but she also was passionate about arts, architecture, Persian literature and philosophy. She seemed to have passed it on to their progenies. One of their sons, prince Baysonghor, also heavily invested himself in developing the school of Herat, bringing the greatest masters from Afghan and Iranian territories. He also commissioned the illustration of his own Book of the Kings, the Baysonghori Shahnameh (see previous post to learn about the Shahnameh) to follow in the tradition as all of his predecessors who ruled the territories of Greater Iran.
You can see on the picture above how pompous the miniature is, the generous application of gold, the density of ornaments and detail, the complexity of composition and the desire of the artists to show as much of their talent as they can on one single piece of paper. Nevertheless, Baysonghor Mirza was young and a slave to his addictions to drugs and alcohol, which cost him his life and the Empire that he was so keen to inherit. An unfortunate burden for Ulugh Beg.
Alongside miniature painting, other forms of arts, including literature, poetry, calligraphy and historiography also flourished at the Timurid court. For instance the last effective Timurid ruler Ḥusayn Bāyqarā became a patron to the sufi poet Jami and his vizier, Mir Ali Sher Navoi, being himself a poet, advocated for the revival of Persian literature and established his own literature movement in Chagatai Turkish, the language spoken in the region at the time.
Until the 16th century, one of the key criteria of ‘highly commended’ art was the strict adherence to classical rules of miniature painting, in a way that it would be almost impossible to discern the artist. The absence of a unique signature style was considered as the most significant of talents. One of the reasons is that illustrations of manuscripts were usually executed by a group of artists, led under the direction of one ‘great master’. The idea was to commission the representation of each detail, such as the faces, the architecture, the animals, the trees, separately to artists who are best at specifically this one detail to then have a perfect composition as a result. Indeed, it would not have looked as harmonious if each artist painted their assigned details in a very distinctive manner.
Safavid Shah Tahmasp (1524–76) and Behzad.
One day, one young and very talented, but also very stubborn artist emerged from the school of Herat, this was none other than Kamal ud-din Behzad. He did not approve of being forced to blend in with other masters. He wanted to build himself a name, and man, did he succeed at that. You could say that his ego was just as big and loud as his talent. Surprisingly, instead of being casted as an outsider, despite a wave of critique from the established ‘great masters’, his revolutionary approach was praised by Husayn Bayqara, but also by the new ruler, Shah Ismail, a Safavid, who conquered the territories in the early 16th century. The new Shah made Tabriz his capital and transferred Behzad to the Tabriz school, which adopted the new head master’s style.
Behzad breathed identity into his characters. He depicted them with different facial expressions, using bold colours, going for less ornament details, experimenting with bodily expression, in contrast to the stiffness and sobriety of classical miniature art. One such example of his work is the building of the castle of Khawarnaq. You could actually compare it with his own work but painted during his studies at the school of Herat.
Naturally, in order to announce and legitimise the power shift and the rule of the new Shah, Ismail commissioned an illustration of Shahnameh with a new chapter — his chapter. Unfortunately, he died before it was accomplished. The oeuvre is known as “Shah Tahmasp’s Shahnameh”, because it was completed under his rule. But given his very young age, it was decided that the illustrated manuscript was better be gifted to the Ottoman Sultan Selim II to strengthen their alliance. By the way, in “My name is Red”, Orhan Pamuk imagined a narrative of how the illustration for that manuscript was created, offering accurate descriptions of the controversy of the new style at the time, the innovative idea for the composition and the analysis of painting techniques.
