‘Master Ahmad Musa, who was his father's pupil, lifted the veil from the face of depiction, and the [style of] depiction that is now current was invented by him.’1 This oft-quoted phrase from Dust Muhammad's (fl. 1510–64) preface to the Bahram Mirza Album2 serves as the inspiration behind our title for this Festschrift in honour of Dr Barbara Brend, whose work has enhanced our understanding and appreciation of Persianate painting.

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.

The libraries of the Fatimid caliphs in Egypt (r. 969–1171) are known to have been extraordinarily large, containing hundreds of thousands of volumes on all branches of knowledge. Of these fabled manuscripts, only a handful are known to survive. It has long been assumed that a substantial number of the secular manuscripts would have been illustrated, as many later Islamic manuscripts are illustrated, but no examples are known to have survived, although somewhat more than 150 paper fragments bearing images have been attributed to the period, as well as representations in other media, ranging from carved ivories to ceramics. In the absence of surviving illustrated manuscripts, scholars have deployed several strategies to attempt to reconstruct the lost art of painting in the Fatimid period, most notably Richard Ettinghausen in his seminal 1942 article “Painting in the Fatimid Period” and Ernst Grube in a subsequent series of articles and chapters. This article examines the evidence and explores how scholars have interpreted it within the broader contexts of representation and manuscript illustration in Islamic art.

Ilkhanid rule (1256–1353) heralded a period when the arts of the book flourished, with the production of both religious and secular texts. This article examines the binding of the Hamadan Qur'an (Dar al-Kutub, Cairo, Rasid 72), which was commissioned for the Ilkhanid Sultan Öljaytü (1303–1316) and completed in 1313. The Qur'an, composed of 30 parts, has remained intact in the Dar al-Kutub in Cairo since its arrival in Egypt sometime in the 1320s. The decoration of the binding is representative of the geometrical designs that formed part of the Persian binders’ repertoire before being entirely discarded by the middle of the fourteenth century in favour of lobed and ogival medallions with pendants derived from cloud-collar profiles.1

The first half of the fourteenth century was a discrete period in Ilkhanid Iran during which paintings that pictured elite Mongol women in their true courtly milieu, participating in courtly life and in their contemporary place within societal hierarchies, were produced. It will be argued that a correlation existed between the power wielded by these women in Mongol socio-economic and political spheres and their depictions as formative, important members of the ruling elite; and that the decrease, and ultimate halting, of such representations coincided with changes in their political, cultural and social power. Using Ilkhanid enthronement scenes in the Diez and Istanbul albums to illustrate how visible and prominent the Khātūns were, a fact corroborated by written testimonials of visitors to the Mongol courts, this paper then examines how such images became symbols of legitimacy for later Il-Khans as well as later Persianate rulers in the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries. It will be argued that the image of an enthroned royal Ilkhanid couple carried the weight of political and dynastic legitimacy, and that the inclusion of the Mongol Khātūn was integral to this symbolic importance.

This article looks at all the known seals of Tipu Sultan of Mysore (r. 1782-1799) particularly those found in the manuscripts which formed his Library collection, disbanded in 1799 after the fall of Seringapatam and subsequently divided between the East India Company London (now in the British Library), and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Kolkata. By focussing on the British Library collections certain patterns of usage have come to light, possibly indicating Tipu Sultan's linguistic and literary preferences.

It gives me great pleasure to dedicate this article to Barbara Brend as a mark of appreciation for her patience and help, whose knowledge and advice has been of such benefit to a non-art historian. At the end of this article I highlight an important manuscript from the Royal Asiatic Society's collection which thanks to her sponsorship has now been digitised and is available on the web as part of the RAS digital collections.

Within the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, is a small, but especially interesting anthology of Persian poetry. Although the manuscript's colophon is missing, the stylistic evidence of its badly damaged illustrations and illuminations indicates that it was produced in Shiraz in the 1430s or 1440s. The discussion considers two unusual features of the manuscript, the first of which is that seven folios of a type of paper, generally thought to be of Chinese manufacture, are included among its 171 folios of otherwise Islamic paper. As is typical of this so-called Chinese paper, the folios are coloured—in this case an olive green—and one is decorated with a gold painted design of what appears to be an immature fruit of some sort, along with lobed leaves on a curling vine. Equally intriguing are the scenes and patterns, painted exclusively in gold, that fill the margins of the folios throughout the manuscript. No other such margins are known in any other contemporary manuscript.

This article offers a new perspective on the relationship between manuscript production in Shiraz under the Timurids and in the Sultanate states of South Asia. During the so-called long fifteenth century, between Timur's invasion in 1398 and Humāyūn's return to India in 1555, there was a surge of creativity in the arts, despite the fractured political landscape of multiple courts. The resulting material culture is vibrant and diverse and belies prevalent historiography, which often portrays this period as culturally barren. The discussion will focus on an illustrated copy of the Shāhnāma of Firdausi dated 843/1440, currently in the Khuda Bakhsh Library in Patna, once owned by Muḥammad Shāh, Sultan of Gujarat. A study of this manuscript and its cultural context challenges the notion that ‘outmoded’ traits are the key criteria of a Persian manuscript's possible Sultanate origin. This article further aims to initiate a re-examination of the reception and dispersal of Persian manuscripts in the Indian Sultanates and the future lives of a particular group of manuscripts made in Shiraz.

The Shahnamah (RAS 239) copied for the Timurid prince, Muhammad Juki (1402–1445) in Herat, has long been considered one of the finest surviving, illustrated Timurid manuscripts. It was presented to the RAS in 1834 by Lieutenant Colonel Doyle (1787–1848), but attracted little scholarly attention until Barbara Brend published her monograph in 2010. The manuscript contains 31 exquisite miniature paintings, two of which (fol. 430v and fol. 531r) were added later during the Mughal period (1526–1761). This article will examine the sumptuous, jewel-like colours employed to depict scenes from the epic and the metals, pigments, and dyes from which they were derived. Precious metals and organic colours made from plants such as indigo and lac extracted from female insects are examined in detail: the methods of their production and extraction, the techniques used for their application, their commercial value, and the prestige they afforded their patrons all contribute to an understanding of what constituted the miniature painters' palette in the Timurid period.

The double-page frontispiece to the manuscript of Saʿdi's Būstān transcribed for the penultimate Timurid ruler Sultan Husayn (r. 1469–1506) and now in the National Library of Egypt (Adab Farisi 22) is well-known and oft-published. Reproduced repeatedly since the turn of the twentieth century, it has become part of the canons of Persian painting, Timurid art, the oeuvre of Bihzad and his circle, masterpieces of the Cairo Library, and more. Connoisseurs and scholars have repeatedly discussed its period details. Barbara Brend, the scholar we honour in this volume, who has written so mellifluously about Persianate painting, analysed the identity and pose of several figures in it. Here I should like to continue the lengthy isnād, suggesting three ways of examining the frontispiece in the context of the manuscript to which it belongs, first structurally as the opening spread in a codex, then literarily as the introduction to a specific text, and finally, historically as a pictorial encomium to the princely patron for whom the manuscript was produced. Altogether, the article looks at three different ways of reading this and other pictorial frontispieces.

The celebrated universal Islamic history, Mīrkhwānd's Tārīkh-i Rauḍat al-ṣafā, written in Herat in the late Timurid period, became a model for later Persian histories, but has not yet been the subject of any substantial critical analysis as a work of historical literature, or in terms of its manuscript transmission. Although numerous copies exist of different volumes of the text, only a handful have been illustrated, providing another dimension to the reception and ‘reading' of the chronicle. This paper focuses on the fourth volume of Mīrkhwānd's history, on the Persian dynasties up to the rise of Timur, four copies of which have been illustrated, among them the Royal Asiatic Society’s manuscript no. P. 38. After detailing the ten pictures in the manuscript, the article concludes with a discussion of their character and purpose.

This article1 suggests that some works in the muraqqa' of Bahram Mirza (Shah Tahmasp's brother) in 951/1544-45 (Istanbul, Topkapı Palace Library, H. 2154) may have come from the well-known album compiled and decorated by Bihzad, from which only the preface by Khvandamir remains. Dust Muhammad (the calligrapher) thus included the works of Bihzad that had previously been part of Bihzad's album, together with their captions, in Bahram Mirza's muraqqa'. In working on his album, Dust Muhammad followed the style of Bihzad, adding the inscriptions to the unsigned works in the same handwriting in similarly decorated panels. It suggests that Bahram Mirza's muraqqa' follows the same arrangement as that compiled earlier by Bihzad, which was probably one of Bihzad's most important works of the Safavid period when he worked in the court workshop of Shah Tahmasp in Tabriz.

This article will focus on a Persian manuscript of Central Asian origin of exceptional literary, historical, and artistic importance. It is a selection of poetry, which was composed in Herat and written in 1531–32 in Bukhara and now belongs to King's College, Cambridge (King's Pote 186). It is the second part of my research on this manuscript, and I shall concentrate mainly on its textual and artistic peculiarities. The first part, which was published recently, was dedicated to its provenance as well as its historical and religious setting.1 The studies also reflect the political, social, and cultural processes in a contemporary turbulent world. Among these are the Shaybanid and Safavid conquests of sixteenth-century Central Asia, Shah Jahan's literary preferences, the colonial ambitions of the former Cambridge graduate Ephraim Pote, East India Company agent-turned-scholar Antoine Polier, and expertise of the crème de la crème of Victorian Cambridge academia.

The Rare Books department at the Free Library of Philadelphia owns a deluxe manuscript of Sa'di's Kulliyat, originally produced in mid-sixteenth century Shiraz and substantially modified in more modern times. Among the alterations was the insertion of a copy of the famous Timurid painting “Humay and Humayun in a garden”, belonging to the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris. The Philadelphia version of the Paris painting was likely based on either a published reproduction or a photograph taken of the original composition when it was on view at the ground-breaking 1910 exhibition “Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst” in Munich. That photographic reproductions could result in pictorial replicas reveals once again the market forces behind the great interest in, demand for, and production of classical Persian painting during the early twentieth century.

The long tradition of asceticism in India has an extensive iconography. It usually represents a poor and emaciated man, living on his own, occasionally with wild animals for company. Hindu and Muslim art and literature contain many such scenes, but female ascetics or yoginis only rarely appear. However, there is a seventeenth-century miniature in the Rietberg Museum which depicts the well-known subject of a young disciple visiting her guru. Seated together in a landscape in front of a thatched hut, they are surrounded by precisely painted Ustad Mansur-style flora and fauna. It was customary practice in Indian workshops for artists to copy original works by their masters, and to make versions using a stencil or charba. This particular miniature has been recreated several times. In the earliest, the two yoginis are placed in the same setting with their modest possessions. The topos remained popular until the end of the eighteenth century when a change occurred: the disciple of the old yogini disappeared, having been “swallowed up” by a tiger. Instead of two mystics talking together, the scene depicted is that of a tiger near a hermit, a typical Ragamala image known as Bengali Ragini. These new compositions were readily acquired by European collectors. A final version also exists that derives from the original Mughal topos which depicts the three: hermit, tiger, and…disciple.

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 discusses a number of nineteenth century playing boards for the Sufi form of the traditional Indian board game of gyān caupar̩ (the Chaupar of Gnosis), from which modern Snakes and Ladders derives. Usually comprising 100 squares inscribed in Persian, the playing area conducts the players hazardously upward from lower spiritual states to the final goal of heaven, according to the throw of dice and sudden demotions or promotions through snakes or ladders. Most surviving examples are held in British collections, including that of the Royal Asiatic Society. Detailed attention is given to a unique, expanded version of the standard Sufi board which came to light a few years ago. Innovative and elaborate in its structure, method of play and nomenclature, it seems however to have been a late and short-lived experiment.

The name Ilqāy appears on small monetary weights for 1251 and 1252 in Cairo at the beginning of Mamlūk rule. This person was a high official in the treasury, responsible for regulating monetary transactions. However, the name is not Arabic but Mongolian—and at this point, the Mamlūks and Mongols were contesting the Middle East. This article traces the meaning of the unique name and its appearance in Mongol history. It then discusses the hypothetical way in which Ilqāy developed Mongol coinage in his early career. The violent purges of the Mongol civil war may have forced him to escape and enter Egypt's financial system. This biography is hypothetical since there is no literary evidence for mint activity and personnel at this time. Nevertheless, the unusual name and timing create a mystery that invites special consideration.

The article sets the discussion of Islamic art within the very animated discussions of the last few decades by many prominent scholars that have sought to pinpoint its nature and that have highlighted the twin dangers of over-generalisation and too narrow a focus. Given that the parameters of the discussion have undergone radical change, and the need to revise traditional paradigms, the article confines itself to Islamic art in the medieval period and the central Islamic lands, especially through the prism of nature. Problems of definition and of the usefulness of medieval texts, and the roles of abstraction and contemplation, are reviewed in turn and the article ends with an attempt to define more closely the aesthetics of a single branch of Islamic art, namely medieval Persian book painting.