Walters Shâhnâmeh Miniature Paintings: Windows into Iranian Culture Pages from Walters Ms. W.600 with several pages from Mss. W.601/602/603 Shâhnâma [Book of Kings] (1010 CE) by Ferdowsi (940-1020) slides and commentary by
Michael Craig Hillmann, Persian Studies www.Academia.edu/MichaelHillmann with
Jim Hillmann, Sculptor and Painter www.jimhillmannart.com
• See www.thedigitalwalters.org/Data/WaltersManuscripts/html/W600 -601-602-603/description.html for a description of the manuscripts and folio numbers for the images presented here. • The written commentary accompanying slides does not appear in live presentations of the PowerPoint show. A DVD of the show with written commentary is made available to attendees
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The Walters Art Museum, 600 N. Charles St., Balti more
• In the 1950s, as a student at The Cathedral School three blocks south of The Walters, I had swim team practice three or more times a week at the YMCA on Franklin St and/or The Knights of Columbus five blocks farther north on Cathedral St. Because swim practice began an hour or more after school let it, brother Jim and I had a handful of choices of things to do during that hour, among them hanging out at Enoch Free Library, climbing the Washington Monument, or checking out The Walters. Walking through the sculpture section past suspicious guards at The Walters and through painting galleries and staring at tapestries once a week made art and visiting museums and galleries and looking at paintings, sculptures, and textiles a natural thing for me to do, at least one such visit almost every day when I’m away from home. In addition, that childhood experience made me feel that the past lives in the present. For at the beginning I didn’t look at the plaques next to sculptures and thus didn’t think of them as separate from me in time, place, and culture (although I know that the cultures inside the Walters were different from those outside). But, for me a child, both were Baltimore the way more than a dozen Paris museums and three Manhattan museums are Paris and New York for me as an adult. • As things have turned out, I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Iranian paintings, buildings, handwoven carpets and other Iranian handicrafts and sensed almost from the beginning of six+ years of residence in Iran that the artistic past there is alive in distinctive ways in the Iranian present, and that has led me online to The Walters collection of Persian miniatures paintings and to Walters Shâhnâmeh Miniature Paintings2 as Windows into Iranian Culture.
• Walters Shâhnâmeh Miniature Paintings as Windows into Iranian Culture presents and discusses illustrations from manuscripts of Shâhnâmeh [Book of Kings] (1010 CE), a Persian verse redaction of Iranian national epic narratives by Abolqâsem Ferdowsi (940-1020). • For example, the painting to the right depicts the legendary Giyomars, the world’s first king according to the Shâhnâmeh, surrounded by his subjects and wild animals who were tame in his presence, in the mountainous area where he settled. • For most spectators of this miniature painting, four features of it may initially seem foreign and intriguing: (1) the stylized calligraphy that accompanies it and tells the story of which the painting depicts a scene, (2) its setting and subject, (3) the story behind it, and (4) the painting style. .
• Walters Ms. W.600
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• Published in 1989, The Arts of Persia presents twenty essays treats: early art, the art of the Achaemenians (559-330 BCE), the art of the Parthians, the art of the Sasanians (224-651 CE), architecture, carpets and textiles, metalwork, jewelry, coins, painting (13 th-17 th centuries), painting in the post-Safavid (1501-1636) period, arts of the book, lacquerwork, ceramics, tilework, glass, and calligraphy. • But The Arts of Persia ignores 20th-century Persian art, a century in which Iranian architecture, Persian carpets, arts of the book, calligraphy, and the like continued culture-specific traditions and added to the tradition. • The orientalist antiquarianism of The Arts of Persia may not affect art historical appreciation of the art objects it treats or in vacuo aesthetic appreciation. But, its failure to treat 20th-century Iranian art–why some people call the place Persia and not Iran is another, not irrelevantstory–makes impossible appreciation of its art objects as windows into Iranian culture. 4
Walters Ms. W.603, page dated 19th century
• Ghaznavid Sultan Mahmud (ruled 999-1030), during whose reign Ferdowsi (940-1020) completed his Shâhnâmeh in 1010 and died, with his slave Ayyâz and the poets Ferdowsi, Onsori, and Asjadi, the names of all five characters written above or next to them. • setting • Qâjâr and not Chinese faces, fewer decorative element, two obvious foci of attention • king still at the center of the Iranian universe in the company of famous Persian poets famous for telling stories about and composing panegyrics for kings.
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Ferdowsi’s much visited tomb (1935) in Tus, the poet’s birthplace, near Mashhad
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• Beneath an image of faravahar , a Zoroastrian guardian angel also depicted in bas reliefs at Persepolis (518 BCE- ), appear the opening couplets of Ferdowsi’s preface to his Shâhnâmeh:
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Stature of Ferdowsi, Mashhad, Iran
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Ferdowsi Square, Tehrân
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Hakim Abolqâsem Ferdowsi, Dushanbe, Tajikistan
• Ferdowsi is a national poet and his Shâhnâmeh a national epic in Afghanistan, Iran, and Tajikistan.
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Amir Sâdeghi, prominent Shâhnâmeh performer [naqqâl] Tehrân, 2014
Speak this sentence to the wind’s ears So that not no one in the world be troubled Then give this reminder: Should Iran not exist, may my body not exist!
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Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh in the lives of Persian-speaking Iranians in Iran and abroad. • children’s stories • comic books • pop music\ • short stories • prose retelling of Shâhnâmeh stories • feature films • animation films • opera • orchestral music • ballet • stage plays • poems • recitations and performances • proverbial statements and saws
• the subject of elementary, secondary, and college/university course units and courses • memorization of Shâhnâmeh passages and scenes as school assignments • naming of male children after Shâhnâmeh heroes Bizhan, Esfandiyâr, Kâveh, Khosrow, Rostam, Siyâvash, and Sohrâb • naming of female children after Ârezu, Farânak, Homây, Katâyun, Manizheh, Nâhid, Roshanak, Rudâbeh, Shirin, Sudâbeh, and Tahmineh. • academic and scholarly publications
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• This aptly titled volume of English translations of contemporary Persian prose versions features 100+ plates of mainly 16th-century Shahnâmeh miniature paintings and details of paintings suggests suggests the intimate connection between Ferdowi’s narratives Persian miniature paintings. • Of further cultural interest is the great appeal of Ferdowi’s stories about kings and their throne in a book called Book of Kings for culturally nationalist Iranians who have long opposed monarchy.
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• The title of this 2002 Persian animation film vis-à-vis the filicide with which Ferdowsi’s story of Sohrâb and Rostam ends suggests a patriarchal order in which the blood of the next generation can reenergize the fathers in power.
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• One in a series of comic books presenting Shâhnâmeh stories, its here the most famous Iranian paladin of them all, Rostam, who served Iranian monarchs for hundreds of years and, along the way, killed his own son and the promising prince Esfandiyâr.
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from the series of postage stamps commemorating the International Ferdowsi Conference in Tehrân and Tus, 1990
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Tehrân’s Milâd Tower and a 21st-century Persian miniature-style wall mural
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Rostam and Sohrâb in combat by Nasser Ovissi (b. 1934)
• Ovissi’s painting exhibits stylistic affinities with miniature paintings and incorporates stylized calligraphy into the scene. • Walters Ms. W.600 Shâhnâmeh and Mss. W.601-602-603 have art historical and aesthetic art appreciation significance that Walters Shâhnâmeh Miniature Paintings as Windows into Iranian Culture does not treat. The exclusive focus in these slides is the cultural import of the paintings in these Shâhnâmeh manuscripts • The fact that a 1,000-year old tradition of artistic calligraphy and a 700-year old tradition of miniature painting figure significantly in 21st-century Iranian art is a telling piece of that cultural import. • The facts that Rostam kills his blameless son Sohrâb and that the fathers of Siyâvash and Esfandiyâr are also responsible for their sons’ death speak to a theme of son-killing in Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh and Iranian culture. 19
• The two most recent English translations of Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh, Dick Davis’s in 2006 and Ahmad Sadri’s in 2013, feature covers that associate the work with Persian miniature painting.
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Rostam battling a dragon (left) and Sohrâb battling Gordâfarid (right) by Mahmoud Farshchian (b. 1930), inspired by stories in Ferdowsi’s Shahnâmeh
• These two paintings are evidence of the continued vitality of miniature painting techniques in 21st-century Iran. The same holds for their subject, Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh 21 (1010 CE).
The First King Kayomars (2013) by Hamid Rahmanian
• Ahmad Sadri’s 2013 translation of Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh: Epic of the Persian Kings resolves the cultural conundrum of the catastrophic 7th-century Iranian defeat at the hands of invading Muslim Arabs by ignoring the final stories22in the book.
• Stuart Cary Welch’s highly regarded academic study, published in 1972, of an especially appealing and important Shâhnâmeh book, the so=called Houghton Shâhnâmeh produced during the reign for Safavid Shâh Tahmâsp (1514-1576, ruled 1524=1576), A King’s Book of Kings is art historical and elitist in orientation. 23
Welch in A King’s Book of Kings on Persian Miniature Painting • “Iranian artists never attempted to hold a mirror to the real world. They transformed its appearance and spirit into a conventional scheme. They reduced the solid three-dimensional world of appearances to an arbitrary two-dimensional scheme. Recession in space was implied by overlapping and by placing distant objects toward the top of the picture, nearer ones to the bottom. Gardens, courtyards, and pools were rendered as though seen from overhead.” • “Artists conceived whole pictures as color compositions, sometimes inventing palettes based on combinations of two or three colors. Within these schemes they introduced accenting units– color clusters which lead our eyes from one unit to the next. At time there are as many as a dozen hues of the same color in a single picture.” • “Iranian miniature paintings seldom have single centers of interest”. • What all of this says about Iranian culture anon.
The Art Historical Appreciation of Persian Miniature Paintings
• Stuart Cary Welch’s essay (pp. 15-76) that precedes “Pages from the Houghton Shah-nameh” (pp. 77-188) in A King’s Book of Kings (1972) is both the definitive description of the genesis of the famous, early 16thcentury Shâhnâmeh of Shah Tahmasp and a rich description of the history of illustrated Shâhnâmeh manuscripts and their painting styles. • A King’s Book of Kings also sets a standard for art historical appreciation of Shâhnâmeh of Shâh Tahmâsp and implies an elitist aesthetic that the elitist art of pre-modern Iranian royal court miniature painting–only a few people even saw the book in the first half of the 20th century–invites. • In contrast to Shâhnâmeh of Shâh Tahmâsp, according to Welch: “…the bulk of Iranian book painting…is [not] of excellent quality. Like so much of the world’s painting, [it] must be considered goods rather than art. The countless illustrated manuscripts of an uninspired sort…have given the field of Iranian painting, if not a bad name, at least a dull one. Though passably accomplished in technique and finish, fresh ideas are almost never found in…these paintings (22).” 25
Cultural and Aesthetic Appreciation of Persian Miniature Paintings • In a cultural analysis of Shâhnâmeh miniature paintings as culturespecific art and windows into a specific culture, which is the business of these slides, art history may play an insignificant role if the practice of Persian miniature painting continues to the present day or if viewers see Persian miniature paintings as part of the present. Earlier slides have tried to make that two-fold case. • Similarly, although the aesthetic orientation observable in Persian miniature paintings and their identifiable aesthetic conventions and traditions are relevant to the appreciation of them in cultural terms, the analysis and appreciation of specific miniature paintings as appealing art need not figure prominently in a cultural analysis, in this case the culture of educated Persian-speaking Iranians today. • The already suggested special status and popularity of Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh in contemporary Persian Iranian culture accounts for the attention given here to its illustrated manuscripts, and the pages in Walters Ms. W.600 and Mss. W.601/602/603 seem perfect as objects for cultural appreciation. 26
Aspects of the culture of educated, Persian-speaking Iranians • 3,000 years of history and living on the Iranian plateau. • 2,500+ years of monotheism from Zoroastrianism to 12er Shi’ite Islam. • 2,500 years of monarchy and patriarchy. • 1,000+ years of Persian language continuity and reference for the national language. • Memories of the Achaemenid (550-330 BCE), Sâsânid (224-651 CE), and Safavid Empires (1501=1636 CE). • Memories of the conquests and occupations by Alexander the Great (330 BCE), the Muslim Arabs (636- ), the Mongols (1220 - ), Tamerlane (1390s- ). • A cultural divide between Iranianness before and after the Arab Muslim in the middle of the 7th century CE. • Solar calendar years that commence at the vernal equinox with New Year’s celebrations from March 21st to February 2nd . Year 1 in the Iranian solar calendar is 622 CE, the year in which the Muslim prophetMohammad (c.570-632) left Mecca with his followers for Medina. 2015 CE =1994 in the Iranian solar calendar. • Lunar calendar years in a calendar that commences with the flight of Mohammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE or Year 1 AH [anno hejirae]. 2015 CE = 1436 AH. • “Persian” [fârs] Iranian culture, including a presumed Fârs/Persian ethnicity or heritage. • A sense of Indo-Europeanness and difference from Turkish and Arab neighbors. • An Iranian national cuisine. 27
Culture beliefs, customs, arts, etc., of a particular society, group, place, or time customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group Merriam-Webster.com
• The notion of culture behind the characterization of these slides of Walters Mss. W.600-603 Shâhnameh miniature paintings as culture-specific art and as windows into Iranian culture holds that a culture such as the Iranian culture of educated Persianspeaking Iranians does not have specific cultural characteristics unique to itself, but that a specific cluster of cultural characteristics can be particular and perhaps peculiar to Iranian culture. • The concentric circles on the next slide illustrate the notion. The circle to the right lists features, aspects, and characteristics commonly associated with the culture of educated Persian-speaking Iranians, while readers can identify for themselves the specific culture described in the circle to the left and note features and characteristics it shares and does not share with Iranian culture.
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Iranian art for educated, Persian-speaking Iranians includes royal court art from the following discrete eras (above the line): • Marlik treasures (c.1000 BCE) • Luristan bronzes (c.1250-650 BCE) • Achaemenid art (559-330 BCE) • Parthian Art (250 BCE-224 CE) • Sâsânid art (224-651 CE) • Sâmânid art (864-1005) • Ghaznavid art (999-1030, reign of Mahmud) • Saljuq art (1055-1157) • Mongol art (1220s-1250s)…Persian miniature painting • Il-Khânid art (1265-1337)…Persian miniature painting • Timurid art 1405-1447)…Persian miniature painting • Safavid art (1501-1722)…Persian miniature painting • Qâjâr art (1796-1925) • Pahlavi art (1926-1979) ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– • Islamic Republic era art (1979-2015?) • Iranian diasporic art, 1960s to 2015
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Marlik gold cup
Luristan bronze horse bit
• Decoration has always figured significantly in in ostensibly utilitarian objects in Iranian art, and lions and horses are particularly significant images in Iran art from antiquity to the contemporary period. Commentary on later slides considers the cultural significance of these two facts. 31
Persepolis, an Achaemenid palace complex begun in 518 BCE
• Persepolis was a spring-time Achaemenid (559-330 BCE) ceremonial capital. Its Apadana was a colorful roofed stone garden with stone column trees. Persepolis was also a tribute to the 32 Achaemenid imperial monarchy and to the Zoroastian diety Ahuramazda.
Achaemenid Emperor Darius (ruled 523/2-486 BCE) on the throne attended by Persians and approached by a Mede
• Persepolis iconography speaks to monarchy, patriarchy, formality and ceremony, religiosity or piety, and to Persianness, the special status that “Persian” [fârs] Iranians had there and in Iranian culture. The existence of Persepolis motifs and themes in 20 th- and 21st-century may suggest the continued relevance in the culture of some educated Persian-speaking Iranians of 33 monarchical, patriarchal, and ceremonial orientations.
An Achaemenid seal depicting Emperor Darius (ruled 523/2-486 BCE) hunting the king of beasts, the Zoroastrian guardian angel called faravahar above the emperor’s chariot
• In pre-Islamic Iranian art, the Persian king is the quintessential Iranian, and his royal power and right to rule comes from God.
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Investiture of Sâsânid Emperor Ardashir I (ruled 224-240 CE) by the Zoroastrian deity Ahurâmazdâ
• Horses are here serving God and king, while the bas relief reveals monotheism as a pre-Islamic hallmark of Iranian culture.
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A Sâsânid plate depicting a Sâsânid emperor hunting rams on horseback
• Pre-Islamic Iranian art is naturalistic, with a sense of three dimensions, and often monumental. As for Iranian art from the 900s to the 1700s CE, images in Walters Shâhnâmh 36 Miniature Paintings as Windows into Iranian Culture typifies it.
• Iranian life culture underwent great changes with the Muslim Arab invasion of the Iranian plateau in the mid-630s CEmand the fall of the Sâsânid empire in 651. Then began a period that Iranian scholars have called “two centuries of silence,” after which the Neo-Persian language of Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh and local Iranian and Turkic rulers emerged. • The Shâhnâmeh thus ends with the defeat of Sâsânids by Muslim Arab invaders and the assassination of the last Sâsânid monarch Yazdgerd III in 651. • Art in the Islamic Iranian world exhibited new subjects, forms, and conventions, the most notable in Persian painting. • This 14-century image of the Muslim prophet Mohammad in the then almost new Persian miniature painting style. Its depiction of Mohammad, as in the case of scores of other such depictions, is testimony against the myth that 37 Islamic art did not depict the prophet.
Ruins of Palace of Sasanid Emperor Ardashir (ruled 224-240 CE) at Firuzabad, Iran
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Sâsânid (224-651 CE) imperial capital called Ctesiphon (next to the Tigris River in Iraq)
• Achaemenid and Sâsânid ruins, besides suggesting great past Iranian power and beauty, remind observers of the transience of things, including Iran’s unrepeatable glory days.
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Facing pages in an Arabic Koran from Iran, Asia Art Museum, San Francisco
• The Koran (650s CE), according to Muslims, is the word of God made word, which made it natural for illuminated Korans and calligraphy to become major art forms in Muslim Iran. 40
Koran pages, 10th century, Iran
• Even in the 21st century some literary texts and many sorts of announcements in Iran are routinely printed from handwritten transcriptions in stylized and stylish scripts, thus lending a decorative character or dimension to a text. 41
The opening “Fâtiha” sura [chapter] (K1:1-7) from a Koran produced Iran in 1817. • This page on which floral motifs and patterns take up much more space than does the text creates the impression of a garden of stylized and idealized garden elements, the calligraphed verses also part of the ideal or heavenly garden. • The facts that the Koran represents for Muslims God’s very words to humankind and that its chief message has to do with the gardens of heaven that await those who live good lives, it makes sense that manuscript illumination of copies of the Koran would depict imagined and imaginary gardens.
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• Continuity of subjects and themes in Iranian art from antiquity to the contemporary period, suggested in foregoing slides, is graphically implied in surveys of that art such as Hamid Keshmirshekan’s Contemporary Iranian: New Perspectives (2013) and Talinn Grigor’s Contemporary Iranian Art: From the Street to the Studio (2014) and graphically demonstrated in Michael Craig Hillmann’s Persian Art as Culture: An Annotated PowerPoint Presentation (2015). • However, as Basil Gray demonstrates in the “Introduction” to his classic study called Persian Painting (1961, 1977), no continuity can be demonstrated in the medium of Persian/Iranian painting between pre-Islamic and Islamic eras and the illustrated manuscripts in which miniature painting became a major art form in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions and occupation of the Iranian plateau between 1220 and 1258. • In Gray’s words, “There seems to be a very ancient tradition of depicting…scenes from national history on palace walls in Persia... [But] In default of any surviving manuscripts, we can only remind ourselves that paper was introduced into Persia from China in 753 A.D. [And] Sasanian painting survives only in fragmentary remains of wall painting…the history of Persian painting before 1200 A.D. has to be pieced together from scraps of evidence, supported by literary references” (p. 11). • For example, again in Gray;s words, “…in the floor-mosaics at Bishapur…the small landscape elements are mere space-fillers, just as they were much later in the Islamic art of the ninth century…So that we may see at Bishapur already thast revolt against naturalism and in favour of the conceptual which is significant for the future.”
“Lion and Lioness”, Iran, 1298 Gray, Persian Painting, p. 20. 43
• "Lion and Lioness,” according to Gray, “is taken from the earliest surviving illuminated manuscript that has come down to us, …probably written in 1298…[and] it contains 94 miniatures…. Fable books or natural history manuscriptsThe style of these miniatures is unnaturalistic. They are flat diagrams, thethe animals being decoratively designed in a setting of conventionalized landscape elements. The outline is strong…trees…are not derived from nature directly, but are generalized foliage on the stems in a decorative pattern…grass…a repeated leaf symbol (p. 22)
change
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“Mare followed by a Stallion,” Iran, 1298 Gray, Persian Painting, p. 21. • According to Gray in Persian Painting, a “balance [exists] between the monumental and the naturalistic in the animals drawings” (Iran, 1298)…”the spectator is now looking through the paper into a world that opens out beyond it,…the view to be cut off at any point that is convenient by the edge of the picturepicture space…the concept of the window, setting the miniature beyond the surface of the written page of the manuscript…” (p. 23).
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• Manuscripts illustrated with miniature paintings and albums containing miniature paintings became the major sort of painting in the 13th century on the Iranian plateau and remained such until the end of the 17th century. • Notable among the manuscripts that inspired and featured miniature paintings are transcriptions of five Persian romantic idylls by Nezâmi (1141-1209 ) called Panj Ganj [Five Treasures], the Divân [collected poems] of Hâfez (c.1320-c.1390), and the Iranian epic called Shâhnâmeh [(The) Book of Kings (1010) by Abolqâsem Ferdowsi (940-1020). This 16th-century painting from Walters Ms. W.600 of Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh, depicts the legendary Kayânid Iranian king Kaykhosrow and his army attacking a devil fortress called Bahman.
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Laylâ and Majnun at School a page from a manuscript of Nezâmi’s Five Treasures • Arabesques, shâh ‘abbâsi motifs, vines, and other floral motifs appear behind and above the teacher and on the red-bordered and dark blue field of the curvilinear Safavid Persian carpet beneath five of the students in the painting, and stellate other rectilinear shapes and patterns also appear on the wall. These elements, as well as the decorative use of pure colors, make the painting’s decorative appeal as significant as its narrative appeal. • In addition, the paintings twodimensional, depthless, and perspectiveless surface in which figures in the distance are as large as those in the foreground, and the characters’ Chinese physiognomies , the painting does not remind readers of an real world beyond, but rather emphasizes an imagined, imaginary, non-mimetic fictional world, the world 47 of a romantic idyll.
from Hafez’s Divân, c.1533 • In the words of Basil Gray, this painting depicts “a prince seated with a girl on a carpet set in a flowering garden, where they are entertained by musicians and dancers, and enjoy a cup of wine poured for them by a page. They are shaded by an…elegant canopy, and are in a sentimental mood. The clou to the picture…lies in the pair of girls who sway toward one another as they work their castanets …the composition is…simple…But every figure and plant is carefully place, so as to build up a…rhythmical…féte champêtre… while the simple conventions for hillside and clouds close this enchanted visions more suitably then a more naturalistic view…” (Persian Painting, pp. 136-7). • The couplet at the top of the page reads: “A flower without the face of the beloved is joyless / Spring without wine is joyless.” Both the painting and the poem that it accompanies argue against the popular characterization of Hâfez as a Sufi poet. 48
• Because the Walters Shâhnâmeh miniature paintings appear within and illustrate the texts of specific stories in Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh and because their original viewers would be reading the stories along with looking at the accompanying paintings or likely already know the stories, today’s viewers of the paintings might learn something about the stories in order to enjoy and appreciate the paintings as windows in culture. • The most accessible and readable English translation of Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh is Dick Davis’s The Epic of the Shâhnâmeh (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2007). • The most recent translation and one that includes miniature paintings by Hamid Rahmanian is Ahmad Sadri’s translation and adaptation called Shahnameh: The Epic of the Persian Kings (New York, NY: The Quantuck Lane Press, 2013). • Neither translation includes Ferdowsi’s prefatory praise of the Muslim prophet Mohammad (c.570-632) and his son-inlaw ‘Ali (c.601-661), the 4th Muslim caliph (ruled 656-661) and the 1st Shi’ite Imam (after Mohammad’s death in 632). Often the reason for ignoring Ferdowsi’s profession of faith in and devotion to Islam and for asserting incorrectly that he eschewed Arabic vocabulary in his Shâhnâmeh has to do with Iranian cultural nationalism in which an epic poet who did not embrace the religion and language of invaders would be closer in spirit to many 21st-century Iranians.
Hamid Rahmanian’s 2013 miniature painting of the Iranian army confronting Sohrâb at the beginning of his brief and tragic career. 49
Incipit page in Walters Ms.W.600 with an illuminated title piece, which reads: aghâz-e ketâb-shâhnâmeh [the beginning of the Book of Kings]. This manuscript dates from the 16th-century • The preface begins (in an adaptation of the Warner translation available online): In the name of the Lord of both wisdom and mind, to nothing more sublime can thought be applied The Lord of whatever is named or assigned a place, the Sustainer of all and the Guide,… The artist of heaven’s jewelry. Later couplets in the preface express the poet’s obedience to Allâh and devotion to the Muslim prophet Mohammad (c.570-632) and his sonin-law ‘Ali (d. 661), the fourth caliph and first Shi’ite imam. 50
A plot summary of Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh Ferdowsi begins the narrative proper of the Shâhnâmeh with these couplets: What does the Iranian preserver of tales say about who first searched the crown of greatness in the world? Who was is who placed the crown on his head…. The Iranian preserver of tales said that this throne and crown Giyomart brought onto the scene, and he was king. When he became lord of the world, he settled first in the mountains where he established his throne, and he and his people dressed in leopard skins. It was he who first taught men about the preparation of food and clothing. He reigned for thirty years, seated on his throne, splendid as the sun. The royal farr [effulgence] shone from him… All the animals of the world, wild and tame alike, reverently paid homage to him, bowing down before his throne, and their obedience increased his glory and good fortune. People came to Giyomart as in prayerful prostration and from him they learned the codes of conduct and religion. 51
• Walters Ms. W.600
•Kiyomars was the world’s first king according to Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâmeh, which makes Iran the center of the world and China, Turân, Arabia, etc. on the periphery of world culture. • The king, the center of attention in this painting, is at the center of the Iranian culture in the Shâhnâmeh. • According to the Shâhnâmeh, Kiyomars introduced animal skin clothing to humankind and was so in tune with nature that wild animals were tame in his presence. The world experienced peace and prosperity during the thirty years of Kiyomars’s rule, his only sorrow the death of his son Siyâmak at the hands of the Black Demon. • The painting exhibits a vertical assortment of compressed figures and objects with no depth, mountains conventionally painted and well observed deer (not so the lions). 52
•This miniature painting is another depiction of the world’s first king Giyomars or Giyomart or Kiyomars on his throne, he and his courtiers dressed in animal skins which he introduced to humankind for clothing. Above Kiyomars is a canopy with garden motifs, among them arabesques, and behind him are mountains, and in front of him peaceful wild animals. Stylized calligraphed closed couplets from Ferdowsi’s story of Kiyomars appear above and below the painting. • Note how the two trees in the painting have grown beyond the painting’s window-like frame. Well, that’s what trees will do, keep growing beyond boundaries. One question is: What artistic or cultural premises lead to such a styistic feature? Walters Shâhnâmeh Miniature Paintings as Windows into Iranian Culture asks and attempts answers to many such questions. • As for the exclusive focus here on Ferdowsi’s 11 th-century Shâhnâmeh, it is easy for literate Persian speakers today to read, which keeps its stories alive for them, stories that are more popular in Iran than any other narratives, including so-called scientific histories of Iran.
Walters Ms. W.602, 17th century
• Walters Ms. W.602, 17th century
• This painting depicts Kiyomars on his throne, he and his courtiers dressed in animal skins. Above Kiyomars is a canopy with arabesque motifs, behind him are mountains, and in front of him are peaceful wild animals….,
• Kiyomars was a god-fearing man and a good king. He had as much power as any might have and deseerved the best fromAhuramazda and/or fate could. More than anything else Kiyomars loved his son Siyâmak. But Ahriman saw to it that the love of Kiyomars’ life was killed. In other words–and it be only a hint here for some readers of the story– even the most powerful person or the most powerful country cannot forestall for a minute a fated happenstance. That being the case, less powerful persons and cultures have to recognize that they have even less saying in what happens to them. Fortunately, for readers of illustrated manuscripts of the Shâhnâmeh, the pages with their handwritten texts, illumination, and miniature painting give readers a reassuring or escapist garden experience.
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Walters Ms. W. 602, 17th century
Faridun kills Zahhâk
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He had a handsome son, who was wise and eager for fame, like his father. His name was Siyâmak, and he was happy. Kiyomars loved him with all his heart; his heart were tears out of love for him; he burned with the fear of separation from him. This situation continued, and the king’s fortune grew luminous. In the world no one was his enemy except for the evil Ahriman. Kiyomars's son Siyâmak is killed by a demon. Siyâmak's son Hushang avenges his father's death and rules as Kiyomars's successor. He in turn is succeeded by his son Tamuras, whose son Jamshid is the greatest of the earliest group of kings called Pishdâdi. The Persian name for the famous Achaemenid ruins north of Shirâz called Persepolis is Takht-e Jamsjhid [throne of Jamshid], intimating association in the popular Iranian imagination of epic myth with national history. 56
• This painting depicts the mythological king Hushang, Kiyomar’s grandson and successor to the Iranian throne, who avenged the death of his father Siyâmak, whom the Black Demon had killed. • Hushang is credited with the discovery of fire. • Shâh ‘abbâsi motifs that appear in Safavid Persian carpet designs and religious architectural decoration appear on the wall/curtain behind Hushang. • Freer-Sackler online at www.Asia.si.edu/explore/shahnama summarizes and illustrates with miniature paintings the stories of Kiyomars, Hushang, Jamshid, Zahhâk, Feraydun, Zâl, and Rostam.
• Walters Ms. W.602, 17th century 57
Continued on Walters Shâhnâmeh 2
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