Throughout its universal history, art has often been used as a vehicle for the visualisation of violence. Judging by the myriad examples of military and execution scenes that were created between the seventh and nineteenth centuries CE , Islamic figurative art, for example, seems to have found almost boundless inspiration in violent events. Military accounts and legal issues serve as the core of many widely illustrated literary forms, including historiography and belles-lettres, which are accompanied by portrayals of the just ruler and the punishment of the sinful. It can be assumed, on the other hand, that the visual arts of any pre-industrial society offer a rather narrow range of brutal imagery. Mostly these depict physical aggression, occurring in war or in the context of law enforcement.

From the monotonous sequence of hanging, stabbing, beheading, stoning and dismemberment scenes, this essay picks a rare case in which the convicted is flayed alive and then his or her skin is put on display as a memento. The key example comes from a dispersed manuscript of the Shāhnāma of Firdawsī, which is variously referred to as the Demotte or Great Mongol Shāhnāma, dated to the 1330s ce, and attributed to Tabriz (fig. 1). It depicts the execution of Mānī (c. 272–6 ce), the founder and prophet of Manichaeism, by order of the Sasanian shah (variously identified as Shāpūr I or Bahrām I). Based on the account of al-Ṭabarī, Firdawsī's text elaborates the events in the following way:

According to al-Ṭabarī, all this occurred in the south-west Iranian city of Jundīshāpūr.

The example set by the display of the stuffed skin of Mānī was meant to be more than just a deterrent. Although this is not mentioned in the text, the anachronistic presupposition of its Muslim author is obviously that the arch-heretic must have been punished in this particular way in order to mock his promulgation of idolatry (shirk).