FR Martin and the Bahram Mirza Album Author(S)
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Disorderly Conduct?: F.R. Martin and the Bahram Mirza Album Author(s): David J. Roxburgh Source: Muqarnas, Vol. 15 (1998), pp. 32-57 Published by: BRILL Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1523276 Accessed: 15/07/2009 16:28 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=bap. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit organization founded in 1995 to build trusted digital archives for scholarship. We work with the scholarly community to preserve their work and the materials they rely upon, and to build a common research platform that promotes the discovery and use of these resources. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. BRILL is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Muqarnas. http://www.jstor.org DAVIDJ. ROXBURGH DISORDERLYCONDUCT?: F.R. MARTINAND THE BAHRAMMIRZA ALBUM In the course of my research on albums made during From this description one can identify materials re- the Timurid and early Safavid periods (fifteenth and lated to the Ya'qub Beg Album (H. 2153); in addi- sixteenth century), it became clear that most of them tion to the general pictorial subjects he describes, it had been altered in varying degrees in later times. A still contains the Florentine etching of Scanderbeg.6 case in point is a Safavid album assembled for Prince Martin also claims that two paintings attributed to the Bahram Mirza, brother of Shah Tahmasp, in 1544- artist Bihzad, Portrait of Sultan Husayn Mirza and Por- 45 by Dust Muhammad, now in the Topkapi Palace trait of a Dervish from Baghdad, came from the Bellini Library (H. 2154). The Swedish-born collector-scholar- Album. These two paintings share characteristics that dealer F.R. Martin once owned many items from this connect them to the Bahram MirzaAlbum (H. 2154).7 Bahram Mirza Album which he claimed came from An attempt to reconcile his description of the Belli- the so-called Bellini Album, now at the Metropolitan ni Album with the album by the same name now in Museum of Art in New York. New York and the materials related to those in the Martin refers numerous times to the Bellini Album Bahram Mirza Album and Ya'qub Beg Album yields in his Miniature Painting and Painters of Persia, India, two possible alternative conclusions: one is that the and Turkeyfrom the 8th to the 18th Century (1912),1 so Bellini Album Martin describes may have been an Ot- named because Gentile Bellini was believed to have toman gathering of choice folios from favorite albums been the artist of one of its paintings. It was said to in the imperial library, trimmed to uniform size and contain paintings, drawings, and calligraphies span- brought together in a new binding during the reign ning the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centu- of Sultan Ahmed I and subsequently disassembled ries.2 Martin believed that it was assembled in the reign under Abdiilaziz in the nineteenth century;8the other of the Ottoman sultan Ahmed I (r. 1603-17), and he that Martin's Bellini Album is nothing more than a explains that later Sultan Abdiilaziz (r. 1861-76) pre- figment of his imagination, an object whose existence sented it to a state official, and then, after the offi- he wished us to believe in.9 cial's death, that it was "divided among his sons."3The Of the two possibilities, I prefer the second. We can portion belonging to one of the sons was brought to discount the first on the following grounds. While the Martin at the Swedish legation at Constantinople, and practice of mining older albums for desirable mate- he purchased it.4 rials is attested by several instances, the modusoperan- Martin's references to the Bellini Album in his book di of album production involved making new margins reveal several intriguing inconsistencies. His scattered for older album folios. In the process the materials descriptions in fact refer to items in several different assembled were not necessarily altered, but they were albums, now in Istanbul's Topkapi Palace Library. In always reframed. Thus, if the Bellini Album is a por- one place he writes: tion of an Ottoman album made at the time of Sul- tan Ahmed I, we would expect its folios to have mar- In its original form the album contained a large num- gins contemporary with his rule.10 This is not the case ber of the most wonderful of animals in the drawings for all of its folios. There is also the problem posed Chinese ornamental of divers kinds style, early drawings by the Ya'qub Beg Album: with one-hundred-and-nine- of work..., a few 13th century miniatures, a copy of the ty-nine folios, it is difficult to imagine that this is only famous early Florentine etching representing Scander- a portion of a much album as Martin beg..., of which the copy now in the print room of the larger suggests, the structural limitations of a leather-and- Berlin library is considered to be unique, etc., etc.5 given pasteboard binding. Further, the Bellini Album bears F.R. MARTIN AND THE BAHRAM MIRZA ALBUM 33 no relation to Martin's description in either its con- ascriptions comparable to the paintings once owned tents or its physical form. by Martin and that is the one assembled by Dust Elsewhere in his text Martin worries about the Istan- Muhammad in 1544-45 for Bahram Mirza.17 Dust bul albums' security. He asks whether one album - Muhammad provided paintings and drawings with then in the private library of Abdilhamid II at the attributions and other comments generated by his Ylldiz Sarayl - is "still in safe custody there?,"ll and connoisseurial method. Recently, scholars noted the remarks that another (most likely the Baysunghur similarity between some of the paintings once owned Album, H. 2152) "at present so jealously guarded, will by Martin and those in the Bahram Mirza Album, probably experience the same fate as all such treasures positing their parent context in it.18 In light of my in the East, and sooner or later be sold secretly in detailed research the identity is incontrovertible, and Paris or London."12 Perhaps the latter was wishful one folio that was detached can now be reconstruc- thinking on his part, though surely he would have ted from its separate pieces. To this reconstructed folio had to bid against equally avid collectors and dealers, may be added two other folios that passed through assuming that he belonged to that select group. Al- Martin's hands, as well as three album folio pieces, mechanisms though we may never know the precise and four other folios now bound in yet another which he the album it would by acquired materials, sixteenth-century Safavid album (all are described in seem clear that his and confusing contradictory the appendix). references served a purpose.13 Martin felt compel- The identification of materials once bound into the led to invent an album as a red that would herring Bahram Mirza Album calls into question our under- conceal the means - licit or illicit - which he by standing of that album. Indeed, they have a signifi- materials from the Istanbul collections. His acquired cant impact on the shape of the album and its illus- fears about the future of the Istanbul albums be may tration of an art history as conceptualized by the album's more than an exorcism of - classic nothing guilt compiler Dust Muhammad. Before returning to a in Fur- psychoanalytic "projection," today's parlance. fuller explication of the relationships of the materi- ther evidence of the of Martin's inconsistency story als to others in the Bahram Mirza Album, the materi- is the of the Portrait of a Dervish from Bag- publication als will be summarized. At the end of the essay I will hdad Gaston in 1907.14 Here the by Migeon portrait return to Martin and his connection with the Bah- bears the de caption "Bibliotheque Constantinople" ram Mirza Album. suggesting its presence in Istanbul up until that time.15 This offers a that chronological problem given MATERIALS FROM THE BAHRAM MIRZA Martin claimed the to have been of the portrait part ALBUM Bellini Album which had left an imperial library the of Abdulaziz 1861-76). setting during reign (r. A Dismantled Folio. Published for the first time in Martin's Miniature Although single-page paintings thought to have come from the Bahram Mirza Album Painting and Painters are a group of paintings data- have been published widely and exhibited, only rare- ble to the late Timurid and early Safavid periods in- ly is their physical structure considered or explained. cluding several works by Bihzad, and others by 'Abd Many items are inscribed with fragmentary rulings and al-Samad and Haydar 'Ali. Many bear illuminated as- are attached to margins. Combined with the diagnos- criptions that identify their artists, all of whom were tic illuminated captions written in nasta'liq script and famous figures in the history of Persianate painting.