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The Study of Persian Painting
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2022
Extract
I do not begin at the beginning, since whatever one wishes to speak of so often follows some significant precursor, but to make a start: F. R. Martin's The Miniature Painting and Painters of Persia, India and Turkey, from the 8th to the 18th Century was published in 1912. Martin describes his book as ‘purely prefactory to a knowledge of a hitherto neglected section of art’. It is an éminence grise, a great slab of a book presumably intended mainly for collectors and so perhaps rather intimidating to students of later ages, but containing a great deal of information, a little of which we would now see as incorrect, and a large collection of illustrations in black-and-white that continue to be useful. There is considerable focus on the work of individual artists and, in particular, attributions to Bihzad abound. Already from the title it is clear that Martin sees the painting of Iran, of (Muslim) India, and of (Ottoman) Turkey as a continuum. The question of whether these areas can—or should—be considered together or severally continues to arise, and must, I think, be decided for each particular occasion. Two other monumental books that, between them, demonstrate this question of choice are Arménag Sakisian's La miniature persane du XIIe au XVIIe siècle and E. Blochet's Musulman Painting XIIth–XVIIth Century, both of 1929.
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- Information
- Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 32 , Special Issue 4: Studies in Honour of Barbara Brend , October 2022 , pp. 721 - 729
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Royal Asiatic Society
References
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24 B. Gray (ed.), The Arts of the Book in Central Asia (Paris and London, 1979). Unfortunately, some passages are misplaced.
25 Islamic Art initially received a grant from the Mehdi Mahboubian Foundation, with later support from the Bruschettini Foundation to the Islamic Art Foundation, New York; with editors Ernst J. Grube and Eleanor G. Sims, and, initially, John Carswell. Muqarnas, edited by Oleg Grabar, was sponsored by the Aga Khan programme for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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34 Martin Bernard Dickson and Stuart Cary Welch, The Houghton Shahnameh (Cambridge, MA and London, 1981). Its illustrations in black-and-white are now superseded for the purposes of picture reference by Sheila R. Canby, The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp (New York, 2011).
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36 Ibid., pp. 16–27.
37 Marianna Shreve Simpson, with contributions from Massumeh Farhad, Sultan Ibrahim Mirza's Haft Aurang. A Princely Manuscript from Sixteenth-Century Iran (New Haven and London 1997).
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39 On one occasion bringing a box of slides on the wrong topic but feeling obliged to lecture from it.
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43 Farhad Mehran, ‘The break-line verse: the link between text and image in the “first small” Shahnama’, in Pembroke Papers: Shahnama Studies, Vol. I, (ed.) C. Melville (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 151–169.
44 Yuri Y. Petrosian, Stuart Cary Welch, Anatoly Ivanov and Oleg Akimushkin, The St. Petersburg Muraqqaʿ; Album of Indian and Persian Miniatures from the 16th through the 18th Century and Specimens of Persian Calligraphy by ʿImād al-Ḥasanī (Lugano and Milano, 1996).
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46 Elaine Wright et al., Muraqqaʿ: Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Beatty Library (Alexandria, VA, 2008).
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48 James White, ‘A sign of the end time: “The Monastery”, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi H. 2153 f.131b’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 27.1 (2017), pp. 1–30.
49 shahnama.caret.cam.ac.uk; islamicpaintedpage.com
50 Sponsored by the Iran Heritage Foundation.
51 I am engaged with the copies of the Khamsah of Nizami Add. 25900 and Or. 6810, both of which make appearances in Martin, Miniature Painting and Painters.