The President and Fellows of Harvard College Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Micrographia: Toward a Visual Logic of Persianate Painting Author(s): David J. Roxburgh Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, No. 43, Islamic Arts (Spring, 2003), pp. 12-30 Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College acting through the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20167587 . Accessed: 06/01/2015 15:00 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The President and Fellows of Harvard College and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Tue, 6 Jan 2015 15:00:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 12 RES 43 SPRING 2003 Figure 1. Humay at the gate of Humayun's castle. Manuscript painting from the Three Masnavis of Khvaju Kirmani, copied by Mir Ali b. Ilyas al-Tabrizi al-Bavarchi, 1396, Baghdad. Opaque pigment and gold on paper, 281 x 191 mm (painted surface). London, British Library,Add. 18113, fol. 18b. (Photo: By permission of The British Library.) This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Tue, 6 Jan 2015 15:00:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Micrograph?a Toward a visual logic of Persianate painting DAVID J. ROXBURGH Persianate Shifting patterns of thought about painting, dynastie founder Timur (i.e., Tamerlane).1 Baysunghur's a movement taxonomic concerns that away from the books embody an aesthetic framed entirely in response become current in recent dominated early studies, have to the visual terms of the Jalayirid tradition.2 However, New lines of have years. investigation responded? the materials are prepared fastidiously, execution osmosis?to concerns in probably by historiographie becomes still more precise, and composition more the of art and contextual modes of historical history rigorously controlled. By ca. 1430, Baysunghur's books an awareness of inquiry. The results include increased had set the standard and put painting on an irreversible intersections the and among scholars, collectors, market, course. Developments in Herat represented a definitive a interest in studies of word and museums; revived movement away from the pictorial experimentation and about the image; questions meanings, functions, characteristic of fourteenth-century painting, best and values of book in the milieus of painting produced exemplified through the Great Mongol copy of the the courts of Iran and Central Asia. pre-modern Shahnama (Book of Kings), Firdawsi's epic. Made in Art historical narratives about Persianate painting western Iran before 1336, paintings such as Bahrain Gur generally hold that the tradition spanned three centuries fights the Karg (fig.2) differ from the laterJalayirid and and its broad outlines are (ca. 1300-1600) readily Timurid traditions by their larger painted surface area, available in studies. are synthetic Long recognized combination of flat color with expansive areas of wash, momentous in book inwestern Iran changes painting and coding of spatial recession by overlapping planes in the 1390s. One in manuscript particular, Khvaju and the bluish effect of atmospheric perspective. One Kirmani's Three Masnavis heralds the (dated 1396), can only assume that painters from the fifteenth century of will in Persianate arrival what become commonplace onward considered some aspects of the fourteenth This future ismanifest in oriented painting. vertically century pictorial language to be too indeterminate; from 1 a rich and compositions (fig. ), polychrome palette, the last years of the fourteenth century onward, the dense accumulations of rendered details. minutely By formal aspects of painting become increasingly coherent the mid-1390s?especially in books of poetry?the and codified. number of in a book became often paintings fewer, Although this narrative of a history of Persianate as few as it is not to notice the eight: impossible painting attends to broad changes in the formal aspects concentration of labor and resources that went into we of painting, are still left wondering, What is a these worked accords richly images. Scholarship Persianate painting? What are the salient visual features to such because of their importance paintings precisely of Persianate paintings and how does one encounter status: more in intermediary prospective orientation, these images? It is strange that such questions have not mark the of "classical" Persianate they beginnings been pursued and that the problems they raise have over. painting. been skipped In some respects, both painting and The form of discernable from the 1390s was painting book?its object carrier?seem to have been taken for embraced and refined in the first decades of the fifteenth granted or at least to have acquired a certain measure of century, especially in Herat under the patronage of a Timurid prince Baysunghur (d. 1433), grandson of the 1. The Timurid dynasty controlled the lands of Iran, Central Asia, and Afghanistan between the period 1370 and 1506. I to 2. would like thank Philippe-Alain Michaud and Sophie Makariou The Jalayirid dynasty (1336-1432) succeeded the Mongols to (Mus?e du Louvre); Cynthia Robinson (University of New Mexico); control the regions of Iraq and Azarbayjan. The "Jalayir" tribe was and Nasser Rabbat (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) for probably Mongol in origin. A succession of patrons made their courts to invitations present versions of this essay. I thank Renata Holod for (Baghdad, Tabriz) centers of literary and artistic achievement, on a her insightful remarks draft. especially Uvays (r. 1356-1374) and Sultan Ahmad (r. 1382-1410). This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Tue, 6 Jan 2015 15:00:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 14 RES 43 SPRING 2003 Figure 2. Bahram Gur fights the Karg. Manuscript painting from the Great Mongol Shahnama of Firdawsi, before ca. 1336, Tabriz. Opaque pigment, gold and silver on paper, 210 x 290 mm (painted surface); 415 x 300 mm (folio). Cambridge, Mass., Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Bequest of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, accession no. 1960.190.2. (Photo: Courtesy of the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Bequest of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller.) This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Tue, 6 Jan 2015 15:00:30 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Roxburgh: Micrographia 15 like it."This humble desire to to others comes familiarity. This familiarity is caused in part by relying on give pleasure as rather a and a relief. art historical paradigms developed for other artistic surprise (ibid. p. 14). traditions as well as from the way that most people This passage shows that some scholars recognize the or encounter Persianate paintings. In either publications inadequacy of Western paradigms for the analysis of exhibitions, a recently longstanding practice?only Persianate painting, and that formerly assumed cultural challenged?was to conceal the text adjacent to homologies do not exist: Persianate painting is "foreign." paintings. Now exhibition spaces combine cases But the assessment raises other problems by its emphases; open books and framed folios mounted on displaying first, the issue of the painter's volition, in an art form that the walls. The compromise endeavors to remind us that was collaborative; and second, by defining the painting a picture seen on a wall should be seen in a book, not as essentially pleasurable and pragmatic. In the same that this fact of Persian painting has passed without essay, the author writes that the Persianate painting is a comment.3 Scholars have yet to attend to the fact that place to escape the "confusion, tension, and cruelty of although the Persianate painting is dense and complex, the world around us," and urges us to contemplate albeit in "miniature/- it cannot be understood as an "these elaborate yet uncomplicated works with the autonomous object analogous to an easel picture of the . simple eyes of children ., delighting in their beauty western European tradition.4 of line and richness of color, and enjoying the strange Focusing on the relationship between word and stories they tell. Their beauties are all on the surface; no a image?now emphasizing the painting's position in spiritual message or Freudian symbolism lurks beneath book?however, can result in the opposite extreme their exquisite forms and colors."7 For this scholar, where painting is only accounted for by its text. This Persianate painting is a curative, a palliative that can more recent approach of word and image studies dates restore the child within us. The painting is an experience to the 1970s. One tendency of these studies has been to of wonder, of seeing things in a way that is familiar to "match" image to text, identifying linkages between the memory yet forgotten, foreign but somehow known. pictorial content and textual content in often quite literal Intriguing inmost writing on