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Space-Forms in the Work of the Baghdād Maqāmāt Illustrators, 1225–58

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 December 2009

David James
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Extract

While acknowledging the complexity of fourteenth-century Persian painting, it would be fair to state that one of the things that makes the painting of 1400 so visibly and obviously different from that of 1300 is the introduction in the course of that century of a number of technical developments which increased, quite dramatically, the area of picture-space available to the artist. Undoubtedly the most important of these was ‘the development of the “high horizon” technique, whereby the ground is seen, as it were, from above so that the figures can be spaced out in various planes without interfering with one another, thus allowing the composition to be conceived on a larger scale with the corresponding diminution in scale of the human figures in proportion to the whole’. To this one might add the expansion of the composition beyond the confines of the frame in a manner more ambitious than hitherto, and, in the early part of the fifteenth century, the appearance of the double-page miniature which is perhaps the logical conclusion of these developments.

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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , June 1974 , pp. 305 - 320
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Copyright © School of Oriental and African Studies 1974

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References

1 Robinson, B. W., A descriptive catalogue of the Persian paintings in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, 1958, 9Google Scholar.

2 For example, British Museum MS Add. 27261, a Persian anthology, Shīrāz, 813–14/1410–11.

3 Grabar, O., ‘A newly discovered illustrated manuscript of the Maqāmāt of Ḥarīrī’, Ars Orientalis, v, 1963, 97–109Google Scholar.

4 Ettinghausen, R., Arab painting, Lausanne, 1961, 106Google Scholar.

5 This is, of course, the most primitive method of MS illustration, as the earliest illustrated fragments of Greek papyri show—e.g. Pap. Letronne 1, Louvre, usually assigned to 165 B.C.

6 Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī, ed. Saba, Isa, Beīrut, 1958, 57Google Scholar.

7 Chenery, T. (tr.), The assemblies of al-Harīrī, I, London, 1867, 140Google Scholar.

8 Blochet, E., Les éluminures des manuscrits orientaux, Paris, 1926, 58Google Scholar.

9 Farmer, H. G., History of Arabian music, London, 1929, 207Google Scholar.

10 ibid., 208.

11 ibid., 208. See also Encyclopaedia of Islam, supplement to first edition, 217–22.

12 Buchthal, H., ‘Three illustrated Ḥarīrī manuscripts in the British Museum’, Burlington Magazine, LXXVII, 1940, 144–52Google Scholar.

13 Grabar, , art. cit., 97–109Google Scholar.

14 This is not necessarily contradicted by the fact that the British Museum copy employs fewer miniatures in the ‘compound plot’ maqāmas than does the Leningrad MS. For reasons of economy, the scribe of the 1256 copy may have decided to employ only one miniature in these more extensively illustrated maqāmas. The first five, 4, 5, 8, 9, 10, have only one miniature while in the other copies from Baghdād two, three, and even four are used. On reaching maqāma no. 15, he must have realized that if reduced to so small a number the miniatures would lose all textual significance, and therefore employed two from then one, except in the case of no. 26. On the other hand, ho may have made a faithful copy of the MS he had in front of him, in which case the original would be later than the Leningrad version, though still earlier than the ‘Schefer’.

15 For a full description of the MS, see Mingana, , Catalogue of the Arabic manuscripts in the John Rylands Library, Manchester, 1934, 929–31Google Scholar. On palaeographic grounds Mingana assigns the MS to the early thirteenth century. The only complete date is a note on fol. 169b: 1044/1634–5. However, on fol. 171b, just after the colophon, is a thirteenth-century reading-note giving the last two figures of a date: Rabī' I, 26 i.e. 626/1228–9? (Mingana, p. 931, n. 4). The text of the MS has been inlaid and enclosed with red lines and the miniatures have been framed. Framing of miniatures and the enclosing of the text in red lines are devices commonly found in later Arabic MSS. These frames and lines date from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, when the MS was ‘restored’. At this time fols. 151–71 were added and the miniatures painted. The pigment is thickly applied and no trace of earlier drawing is visible. Nevertheless, that the painting of earlier drawings was practised is attested by MS Add. 7293 in the British Museum. This latter is a fourteenth-century Mamlūk copy of the Maqāmāt, complete apart from the miniatures, only some of which were painted. Others have been drawn but not painted, e.g. fols. 14b, 16a, 17a. Several centuries later an attempt was made to add some more illustrations to the MS by inserting flower decorations in the empty spaces and by painting over some of the earlier drawings in imitative thirteenth/fourteenth century hand. One of the illustrations to the fifth maqāma, fol. 26b, shows a fourteenth-century drawing partially painted in later times: the figures inside the building remain in their original state while the architectural details have been painted in a crude mixture of styles.

16 Weitzman, K., Illustrations in roll and codex, Princeton, 1947, 104–12Google Scholar.

17 Rice, D. S., ‘The oldest illustrated Arabic manuscript’, BSOAS, XXII, 2, 1959, 214–18Google Scholar.

18 For instance, in maqāmas 12, 20, 21, 25. In the Leningrad, Istanbul, and British Museum copies, the miniatures are located in approximately the same areas of text, usually within a few lines of one another though the position is hardly ever identical.

19 For a full and detailed discussion of the various space-forms used in medieval European painting, see Bunin, M., The forerunners of perspective, New York, 1940Google Scholar.

20 In the materia medica of Dioscorides, see Buchthal, , ‘Early Islamic miniatures from Baghdad’, Journal of the Walters Art Gallery, v, 1942, 19 ffGoogle Scholar.

21 See below, p. 316, type 3.

22 There is a striking example of the use of type l(ii) in the forty-third maqāma. It is instructive to compare this with the scenes illustrating the forty-second maqāma in the Leningrad copy, fols. 278, 283. Both artists employ connected ‘terraces’ with figures on the lower one and architecture on the top. In the Leningrad miniatures, some sense of distance is achieved by reducing the size of the building, so that it appears as if from afar, whereas in the ‘Schefer’ miniature (reproduced in Ettinghausen, , op. cit., 116Google Scholar) the figures and buildings on the upper ‘terrace’ are, in comparison, barely reduced at all.

The only examples of type 3 in the ‘Schefer’ MS occur in the forty-seventh maqāma, fols. 154b, 155b, 156a. Here the lower part of what was an elliptical ground-line (compare with the Leningrad versions of this scene, fol. 328) has become rigidly horizontal.

23 See Rice, art. cit., plates II–III.

24 There is evidence tha t the double frontispiece existed before this date. See Ettinghausen, R., ‘On some Mongol miniatures’, Kunst des Orients, III, 1959, 44–65Google Scholar.

25 Buchthal, H., ‘The painting of the Syrian Jacobites in its relation to Byzantine and Islamic art’, Syria, XX, 2, 1939, 136–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 This is certainly true of the Leningrad Maqāmāt, where a significant proportion of the miniatures are thinly-disguised episodes from the life of Christ. A full survey of Maqāmāt iconography is still wanting.

27 See Weitzman, , op. cit., 91Google Scholar.

28 The miniature illustrating the eleventh maqāma, for example, is derived from an ‘Entombment’ of Christ or perhaps John the Baptist.

29 Grabar, A., Byzantium (Art of the World, XVIII), London, 1966, plate 38Google Scholar; Grabar, A., Byzantine painting, New York, 1953, 177Google Scholar.

30 The earliest use of th e double ground-plane in a Baghdād MS occurs in the materia medica of 1224. See Buchthal, , ‘Earl y Islamic miniatures’, 18–39Google Scholar.

31 Since the Leningrad MS has several lacunae, there is no absolute certainty whether, in its original condition, it may not have had some examples of lateral expansion. However, there are no examples among the remaining miniatures. On the odd occasion when miniatures are placed directly opposite, as in the forty-third maqāma, fols. 286, 287, they illustrate separate episodes.