Wondrous Signature

Chapter 4 explores the expressive qualities of the line in Persian painting and drawing. Using contemporary sources that linked linear precision to the maker’s dexterity and morality, this chapter focuses on the line as a vehicle of artistic representation. For historical viewers, the line read less as a contour designed to create motifs than as an object in its own right, endowed with plastic meaning and expressive effects. The line not only captured the sensory work of artists but it also attested to their moral qualities. Through precision, grace and minuteness, the line became the emblem of a painter’s moral character. Lyrical poetry further testified to the line’s ethical thrust by linking the calligraphic flow of the line to the mystical quest for love.

Writing on the Image

This chapter takes a close look at the semantic richness and transgressive potential of the Cairo Bustan’s illustrated frontispiece, a double painting opening the manuscript and representing a celebration in a royal palace. While the double painting belongs to the tradition of the Persian royal frontispiece, whose main task was to reflect the royal patron’s glory, it also considerably departs from it. In the painting, the king is marginalized, pushed to the periphery by a host of details and scenes. Visual abundance derails the viewer’s attention and suggests multiple lines of interpretation. The frontispiece can be read as a mystical scene, a parody of royal portraiture, and a self-reflective device, shifting our attention from patron to painting.

Chapter One

The introduction presents the book’s main arguments, its methodological principles, its objects of study and the social and artistic context of the late Timurid period. While most scholarship on Persian painting has emphasised either painting’s illustrative function or its relation to the patron, this introduction announces that Persian painting could also serve as a self-reflective device, designed to embody and mediate ideas about artistic authorship, medium, and representation. The introduction also provides information on the historical background of late Timurid Herat, on the scholarship of Persian painting as well as a description of late Timurid painting’s visual characteristics, before presenting the Cairo Bustan, a late Timurid manuscript and the study’s centrepiece.

Manuscripts in Motion

Chapter 5 takes a close look at the signatures of Bihzad in the paintings of the Cairo Bustan. Each signature was concealed as a pictorial detail, taking a different form in each painting. Signatures, moreover, were unusual in Persian painting. This chapter argues that through concealment, variety, ambiguity and uniqueness, Bihzad’s signatures were designed to elicit a feeling of wonder, emphasising the painter’s virtuosity and creativity. Through excessive minuteness, they mythicized the painter and described artistic authority as transcendent, while also obscuring the participation of many other artists and artisans. Signature was thus as much a step toward visibility as it was an instrument of self-praise, and an act of appropriation.

Calligraphic Line

In late Timurid manuscript painting, the area devoted to the illustration of the story narrated in the manuscript shrank dramatically, while a multitude of non-illustrative forms proliferated. Painting became filled with figures and motifs that bore no apparent relationship to the surrounding text. This chapter argues that visual abundance destabilized illustration in order to reference taswir, the process of image making. Aspects of composition and technique such as the painting’s even surface and its grid-like composition further lauded the artist’s creative power. This chapter also shows that painting became a metamedium, designed to interrogate the ontological boundaries of painting and to define its relationship, not to the world as we see it but to God’s creation, to the ideal forms and concepts from which reality was created. As such painting represented potential, rather than actual, worlds.

Potential World

Chapter 2 examines the representation of epigraphic inscriptions in Persian painting, inscriptions that appeared in pictures as ornaments adorning buildings. It argues for a shift in these inscriptions’ content and function in the late Timurid period. Until the mid-fifteenth century, inscriptions were mainly used to link painting to patron. But in the Cairo Bustan, the poetic verses were chosen so as to convey a celebration of the painter. As such they constitute an example of wasf (ekphrasis), a description of the visual that was also a discourse of praise. Moreover, the verses were picked from the poetry of ‘Abd al-Rahman Jami, a late fifteenth-century poet. The inscriptions thus staged a model for the pictures’ reception, a model in which the painting would circulate among famous poets such as Jami, prompting responses about the medium and its makers. A possible institutional setting for such a scenario was the majlis, a form of social gathering that fuelled the art of jawab (response).

Painting about Painting

This book constitutes the first exploration of artistic self-reflection in Islamic art. In the absence of a tradition of self-portraiture, how could artists signal their presence within a painting? Centred on late Timurid manuscript painting (ca. 1470-1500), this book reveals that pictures could function as the painter’s delegate, charged with the task of centring and defining artistic work, even as they did not represent the artist’s likeness. Influenced by the culture of the majlis, an institutional gathering devoted to intricate literary performances and debates, late Timurid painters used a number of strategies to shift manuscript painting from an illustrative device to a self-reflective object, designed to highlight the artist’s imagination and manual dexterity. These strategies include visual abundance, linear precision, the incorporation of inscriptions addressing aspects of the painting and the artist’s signature. Focusing on one of the most iconic manuscripts of the Persianate tradition, the Cairo Bustan made in late Timurid Herat and bearing the signatures of the painter Bihzad, this book explores Persian manuscript painting as a medium for artistic performance and self-representation, a process by which artistic authority was shaped and discussed. In addition, each chapter explores a different theme: how painters challenged the conventions of royal representation (chapter 1); the role of writing in painting, its relation to ekphrasis and the context of the majlis (chapter 2); image, mimesis and potential world (chapter 3); the line and its calligraphic quality (chapter 4); signature (chapter 5); the mobility of manuscripts (epilogue).