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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 June 2022
One of the classical features of landscape in Persian manuscript-illustration is a stream of water. Painted in silver, it winds its way through a picture in a manuscript, punctuating the ground with verdant green on either side, even though the stream itself may have tarnished with centuries of exposure to the air.
Among a small group of paintings kept in several of the celebrated Hazine albums in the Topkapi Saray Library in Istanbul, the group that Ernst J. Grube, in 1980, had called ‘Chinese People’, one stands out, the cover-illustration to an exhibition in London in 2005. There entitled ‘Enthronement Scene’, it is unlike its closest companion-parallels, which have unpainted grounds but no naturally occurring water in the landscape: it has a surface almost fully covered in pigment; but at its very bottom can be seen the tarnished remains of ‘a silver stream in the foreground’.
Placed variously on a continuum stretching ‘between China and Iran’, since about 1972, the prevailing attribution has been to Aq Quyunlu Tabriz around 1480. Given ‘the silver stream in its foreground’, this article re-examines that attribution and proposes that it may be as much as a century earlier but ‘modernised’, given a fully painted landscape, at Ya'qub Beg's court in Tabriz.
This article was first written for delivery at an international meeting on the subject of ‘Nature in Eastern Art’, held in Tehran in December of 2005; it was faintly revised, after a brief visit to the Topkapi Library, and presented at the Second Biennial HIAA (Historians of Islamic Art Association) meeting in 2010, in Washington DC. In 2020, the premise and my conclusions remain unchanged, but the bibliography was partially updated, to take into account several important publications on some of the related paintings, and the related Diez materials in Berlin; other relevant literature has appeared since 2010, and I am exceedingly grateful to the energetic reviewer for additional references that now fill some of the lacunae.
The original version of this article was published with an error in footnote 11. A notice detailing this has been published and the error rectified in the online and print PDF and HTML copies.
1 Sims, Eleanor, Peerless Images: Persian Painting and its Sources (with contributions by Boris I. Marshak and Ernst J. Grube) (London and New Haven, 2002)Google Scholar: the topic is discussed briefly on pp. xi–xii, and illustrated throughout the volume.
2 Ibid., no. 73, pp. 158–159. London, The British Library, Add. 18113, folio 85r.
3 Ibid., no. 74, pp. 159–160. Istanbul, Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, MS 1950, folio 250v.
4 Ibid., no. 235, p. 314. Saint Petersburg, State Hermitage Museum, VR-1000, folio 100r.
5 Ibid., no. 33, pp. 116–117. Baltimore [MD, USA], The Milton S. Eisenhower Library of Johns Hopkins University, John Work Garrett Collection, folios 82v–83r.
6 Ibid., no. 78, pp. 162–165. London, The British Museum, 1948.12.11.023.
7 Ibid., no. 233, pp. 312–313. London, The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, MSS 1030.9.
8 Ibid., nos. 96, pp. 182–183, and 127, pp. 214–216. London, The British Library, Or. 2265.
9 Ibid., nos. 18, p. 104, and 133, pp. 222–223. Divided: the right half in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 14.624, and the left half in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 12.223.1.
10 Ibid., no. 161, pp. 245–246. Windsor, The Royal Library, MS 1005014, folio 279v.
11 Ibid., no. 195, pp. 277–278.
12 Ibid., no. 145, pp. 229–232. Present whereabouts uncertain, formerly in the Chihil Sutun in Isfahan.
13 In Hazine 2153, they are mounted on folios 3v–4r, 6v, 15v, 24r, 90v, 91r, 130v, 131v, 138r, 138v and 164v–165r; in Hazine 2160, on folios 77v and 89v. The connection with the Timurid world, for many paintings and drawings related, in one way or another, to these seven images, began almost as early as the Munich exhibition of 1910: see p. 17 in Islamic Art I (1981), devoted to ‘The Problem of the Istanbul Album Paintings’ (also published as Colloquy No. 10—Between China and Iran—in the series of Colloquies on Art and Archaeology in Asia, hosted by the Percival David Foundation, University of London, in June 1980), especially the comments on the silk painting that would shortly be acquired by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 14.545, there attributed to Herat at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Many more of these paintings and drawings were studied by Ivan Stchoukine and published in 1935: ‘Notes sur les peintures persanes du Serail de Stamboul’, Journal Asiatique 226 (1935), pp. 117–140; some figure amongst his ‘École Transoxianaise’ and ‘Peintures de Style Chinois’; he too thought of ‘Turkestan’ as a likely place for the production of some of them and commented on the ‘Timurid, 15th-century quality of the costume’ but largely considered the majority as rather later, mid-sixteenth century in date. As an important sub-group and altogether, the ‘Chinese People’ group was first discussed by Ernst J. Grube in 1978, after some years of study that had begun as early as 1959 and was, in part, presented to the VIth International Congress of Iranian Art and Archaeology, held in Oxford in 1972: Persian Painting in the Fourteenth Century: A Research Report, Supplement no. 17 of the Annali, Istituto Orientale di Napoli, Vol. 38, 1978, fasc. 4, Part II, pp. 47–52, Figs. 80–101 (hereafter, Annali, 1978); this was reprinted (with minor typographical corrections) in a compendium volume of some of Grube's articles, as Studies in Islamic Paintings (London, 1995), VII, pp. 158–289, with the original figure-numbers for illustrations retained.
14 ‘A Princely Couple With Attendants Around a Tree’ (or—as in Peerless Images—‘The Maiden, Her Duenna, Her Lover, and His Page’), LNS 77 MS: first published by Arthur Upham Pope, ‘A fifteenth-century Persian painting on silk’, Apollo XX (July–December 1934), p. 207; A Survey of Persian Art, Vol. V (Oxford, 1938) (reprinted as Vol. X), pl. 878 in colour; Islamic Art I (1981), Fig. 130; Sims, Peerless Images, no. 151, p. 236; Adel T. Adamova and Manijeh Bayani, Persian Painting: The Arts of the Book and Portraiture. The Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah, the al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait (London, 2015), colour cover, and Cat. 16, pp. 166–170; after conscientiously reviewing eight decades of varying opinions on the date, pp. 169–70, and also noting that it ‘has been cut out all around (irregularly at its lower right-hand corner)’, Adamova assigns it to ‘Tabriz, second half of the fifteenth century’.
15 ‘A Princely Couple with Attendants Around a Tree’, 57.51.24: first published by M. S. Dimand, ‘A fifteenth-century painting on silk’, Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 28 (December 1933), p. 213; Grube, Annali, 1978, Fig. 101; Islamic Art I (1981), Fig. 128; illustrated in colour in a special issue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (Fall 1978), Islamic Painting, p. 18; and also in colour, together with the now-Kuwait painting (note 14 above), in Thomas W. Lentz and Glenn D. Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century (Los Angeles, 1989), p. 186 (where the general attribution is to ‘Timurid Iran or Central Asia, c. 1425–50’).
16 H. 2153, folio 138r, on paper: Grube, Annali, 1978, Fig. 101; Islamic Art I (1981), Fig. 45; Sims, Peerless Images, no. 15, pp. 101–102; TURKS: A Journey of a Thousand Years 600–1600 (Catalogue of a Loan exhibition at the Royal Academy, Burlington House, in London), (ed.) David J. Roxburgh (London, 2005), Cat. 159, pp. 212 and 416, captioned ‘c. 1470–90, Tabriz (?), Iran’.
17 H. 2153, folio 6v, on silk: Islamic Art I (1981), Fig. 47; TURKS, Cat. 162, pp. 212 and 417, captioned ‘c. 1478–90, Tabriz (?), Iran’ and said to be in the manner of the Turkman painter Shaykhi.
18 H. 2153, folios 3v–4r, on silk: Grube, Annali, 1978, Fig. 96; Islamic Art I (1981), Figs. 49 and 51; Sims, Peerless Images, no. 113, pp. 201–203; TURKS, Cat. 216, pp. 252 and 431, captioned ‘c. 1470–90, Tabriz (?), Iran’; but see now the review by Grube, Ernst J. and Sims, Eleanor, ‘Demons and nomads’, Hali 139 (2005), pp. 107–109Google Scholar, Fig. 5, and idem, ‘Signposts to Central Asia’, Hali 140 (2005), p. 23, where the left portion—missing in TURKS and the prior Hali number—is illustrated.
19 H. 2153, folio 130r, on paper: Grube, Annali, 1978, Fig. 92; Islamic Art I (1981), Figs. 384 and 400; TURKS, Cat. 217, pp. 252 and 431, captioned ‘c. 1470–90, Tabriz (?), Iran’. The picture is also widely illustrated in studies on Ming and Timurid blue-and-white ceramics.
20 H. 2153, folio 131r, on paper: Islamic Art I (1981), Fig. 409; Brend, Barbara, ‘Christian subjects and Christian subjects: an Istanbul album picture’, Islamic Art I (1981), pp. 121–129Google Scholar and Fig. 409; Sims, Peerless Images, no. 104, pp. 190–191; TURKS, Cat. 219, pp. 254 and 432, captioned ‘c. 1470–90, Iran’. An immensely important study by Melikian-Chirvani, A. S., ‘The Iranian painter, the metaphorical hermitage, and the Christian princess’, Bulletin of the Asia Institute 16 (2002), pp. 37–52Google Scholar, takes many of us to task for not having recognised the inscriptions on the building as poetry, and builds for us the literary context into which these inscriptions function (although he never actually tells us the precise folio nor the album in which this painting is found; and he consistently refers to its origin as a ‘manuscript’: ‘a single page torn away from a manuscript’, p. 37); his conclusions are that ‘…the painting may be safely placed in Tabriz and dated…between July 1468 and November 1474…’ (pp. 47–48). James White, ‘A sign of the end time: “The Monastery”, Topkapi Sarayi Müzesi H. 2153, f. 131b’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 27.1 (October 2016), pp. 1–30, leaves the reader in no doubt as to his subject's location, suggests a far earlier date—810/1407–8 (pp. 7–8 and 29)—and places the painting in Qara Quyunlu Tabriz around that date, with specific references to the young son of Qara Yusuf, Pir Budaq, symbolically (and numismatically) invested as sultan in 810 (pp. 20–21, no. 106, although he ‘is reported to have pre-deceased his father in 816…’, p. 20, no. 140). An important illustration in Gülrü Necipoğlu's ‘Persianate images between Europe and China’, in The Diez Albums: Contexts and Contents, (eds) Julia Gonnella, Friedrike Weis and Christoph Rauch (Leiden/Boston, 2016) is on p. 588: both ‘The China Cart’ and ‘The Monastery’ are shown as they appear, facing each other on successive pages in their parent-album, H. 2153.
21 H. 2153, folios 164v–165r, on silk: Grube, Annali, 1978, Figs. 97–99; Islamic Art I (1981), Fig. 250; Steinhardt, Nancy Shatzman, ‘Siyah Qalem and Gong Kai: an Istanbul album painter and a Chinese painter of the Mongolian period’, Muqarnas IV (1987), pp. 59–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sims, Peerless Images, no. 247 A-B, pp. 324–326; TURKS, Cat. 141, pp. 187–188, and 412, captioned ‘c. 1400–50, Iran or Central Asia’.
22 H. 2153, folios 90v–91r, on paper: Islamic Art I (1981), Fig. 131; TURKS, Cat. 218, pp. 212 and 431–432 and the colour-cover, captioned ‘c. 1470–90, Tabriz (?), Iran’; again, in colour, in a review of the exhibition by Tim Stanley, Hali 139 (2005), p. 104, Fig. 1.
23 The earliest date, and the most Eastern, attribution, were first adumbrated by Pope in 1934; this view was sustained by Grube in 1972 and published in Annali, 1978, pp. 51–52; restated in Islamic Art I (1981), pp. 8 and 11, and reiterated in a review and a successive letter to the editor by Grube and Sims, Hali, 139–140 (2005) (see note 18 above); the later date and most ‘Western’ attributions also appeared in print in 1972 (see note 27 below). The later date and the Tabrizi attribution are maintained by Melikian-Chirvani's 2002 study on ‘The Monastery’, while White's, of 2016, returns us to very early in the fifteenth century—if in the same Western Iranian city (see note 20 above). Adamova briefly, and generally, summarizes some of the varying attributions in the Kuwait catalogue of 2015, pp. 169–170, although neither study was immediately relevant to the Kuwait silk-painting; more to the point, she also comments on two important shared features, the uncoloured grounds and the manner of delineating the edges of the landscapes (p. 170).
24 Grube, Ernst J., ‘The problem of the Istanbul album paintings’, Islamic Art I (1981), p. 6Google Scholar.
25 The white tent with blue chinoiseries can be seen in paintings from the late thirteenth century onwards: in Diez Album A folio 70, S. 8, no. 1, in colour in The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Islamic Art, 1256–1353. Catalogue of an Exhibition held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, (eds) Linda Komaroff and Stefano Carboni (New York, New Haven and London, 2002), Cat. 31, Fig. 134; in the Great Mongol Shahnama painting now in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art in Kansas City, 55.103, Ernst J. Grube, The Classical Style in Islamic Painting (n. p., 1968), pl. 10; and in the series illustrated in Islamic Art I (1981), Figs. 355–357, 359–360; what distinguishes the earlier versions from that in this picture is the chevron-patterning of the lower edge, which seems to be a Turkman feature, as in Islamic Art I (1981), Fig. 359, as well as Robinson, B. W., ‘“A magnificent MS”: The British Library Shahnama of 1486’, Islamic Art V (2001), pp. 167–176Google Scholar, and colour plate VD, ‘The Enthronement of Nushirwan’ (it was Robinson no doubt who also coined the name ‘Commercial Turkman’, in his ‘The Turkman School to 1503’, The Arts of the Book in Central Asia, (ed.) Basil Gray (Paris/London, 1979), pp. 243–244.
26 Zeki Velidi Togan, ‘On the miniatures in Istanbul Libraries, Istanbul’ (Publications of the Faculty of Letters of the University of Istanbul, N. 1034/Publications of the Department of General Turkish History, N. 2, 1963): English version, prepared for the Second International Congress of Turkish Art, of a proposed—but never printed—Turkish text, pp. 7, 13–14.
27 Welch, Stuart Cary, A King's Book of Kings: The Shah-nameh of Shah Tahmasp (New York, 1972), Fig. 3, pp. 38–39Google Scholar; commented upon in Grube, Annali, 1978, p. 53.
28 Çaĝman, Filiz and Tanindi, Zeren, Topkapi Palace Museum: Islamic Miniature Painting (Istanbul, 1979), no. 47, p. 30Google Scholar. Two more, recent, if contradictory, opinions on the date of the assembly of this album come first from Ilse Sturkenboom, to whom I am much indebted: one is that of the Japanese scholar, Yoshifusa Seki, who believes that it (and H. 2160) both date from the time of Ya'qub Beg, his argument based on the evidence of calligraphers’ names and dedications in both albums: ‘Āthār-i khwushniwīsī dar du murraqaʿ-i Sulṭān Yaʿqūb: yādgārī az ʿaṣr-i Qarāqūyūnlūhā wa Āqqūyūnlūhā’, Nāma-i bahāristān 11–12 (2007), pp. 75–172; and secondly, Gülrü Necipoğlu, who contends that both were compiled under Selim I: ‘The composition and compilation of two Saray albums reconsidered in the light of “Frankish” images’, in the English-Turkish facsimile publication From China to Europe: Two Unique Topkapı Palace Albums (Hazine 2153 and 2160), (ed.) Zeynep Atbaş (Istanbul, forthcoming).
29 As could be observed in TURKS, staged in London in the spring of 2005: consider the most recent attributions for these pictures, in notes 16–22 above.
30 Istanbul, Topkapi Museum Library, H. 762; Robinson, ‘A magnificent MS’, pp. 242, 247: MS 10; the long colophon, detailing the progress of the manuscript's sponsorship, from the Timurid mid-fifteenth century to the early days of the Safavids, in about 1505, is translated by Thackston, Wheeler, A Century of Princes: Sources on Timurid History and Art (Cambridge MA, 1989), pp. 333–334Google Scholar.
31 Welch, A King's Book of Kings, p. 39.
32 See note 18.
33 See note 16.
34 For instance, TURKS, Cat. 209, on p. 247, a copy of the Khamsas of Nizami and Amir Khusrau Dihlavi, with dates of 895/1490 and 896/1491 made in Shiraz.
35 Hazine 2153, folios 24v and 47v, Islamic Art I (1981), Figs. 129 and 132, the trees a mirror-image, but probably deriving the detail of the single branch, high up on one side of the silver trunk, from the painting now in Kuwait (note 14 above), although its smaller leaves are dark-green tipped with yellow.
36 Grube, Annali, 1978, p. 30.
37 On folio 189v; Gray (ed.), The Arts of the Book in Central Asia, pl. LXVII in colour, and also colour-cover.
38 Also in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 57.51.20: first published in the Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin NS, XVI (1958), p. 231, variously in black and white and, most recently in colour, in Sims, Peerless Images, no. 156, pp. 241–242.
39 Gray (ed.), The Arts of the Book in Central Asia, pl. LXIX in colour, p. 233.
40 For instance, lining the cloaks of Nushirwan and Buzurjmihr, in that celebrated British Library Divan of Khwaja Kirmani completed in Baghdad in 798/1396, see Sims, Peerless Images, no. 105, pp. 190–193, and of the ‘Princely Couple’ (note 36 above); of Shirin, in the small anthology made in Shiraz for Iskandar-Sultan and dated 813–14/1410–11, also now in the British Library, Sims Peerless Images, no. 239, pp. 317–318; and of Nushaba, in Shah Rukh's little Khamsa of Nizami, dated 835/1431 in Herat, illustrated in ibid.
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