Europe, China and Istanbul: the Albums in a Broader Perspective

Europe, China and Istanbul: The Albums in a Broader Perspective

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Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Chapter 20 Persianate Images between Europe and China: The “Frankish Manner” in the Diez and Topkapı Albums, c. 1350–1450

Gülru Necipoğlu

The so-called Saray albums in Berlin and system” collapsed with the fragmentation Istanbul have mainly been examined to of the Mongol empire, its artistic reper- map the transformation of the Persianate cussions would continue to be felt long artistic tradition through an infusion of thereafter, as demonstrated by the extraor- Chinese elements in the post-Mongol era. dinary contents of the Saray albums. The fascinating Europeanizing images By taking a close look at the earliest of these albums have therefore largely examples of Europeanizing images (c. 1350– escaped attention and most of them 1450) preserved in the Diez albums and remain unpublished. This state of affairs two Topkapı albums (H. 2152, H. 2153), can partly be explained by the overwhelm- this essay attempts to reframe the Berlin ing prominence of Chinese and Sinicizing and Istanbul albums anew, within a images in the albums. Nonetheless, the wider transnational framework.2 Topkapı sidestepping of works affiliated with the Western pictorial tradition has distorted 1 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hege the global outlook encompassed by the mony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350, New York albums, which originated roughly between 1989; Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the West, 1250 and 1350, when Europe and China 1221–1410, Harlow, England and New York 2005; were brought into contact by the Pax Reuven Amitai-Preiss and David O. Morgan, Mongolica.1 Although the Eurasian “world eds., The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy, Leiden and Boston 1999; Stefano Carboni and Linda Komaroff, eds., The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Author’s Note: I am grateful to Christoph Rauch Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256–1353, for enabling me to examine the Diez albums in exhibition catalogue, Metropolitan Museum Berlin in 2010, and for inviting me to participate of Art, New York and New Haven 2002; Linda in “The Diez Albums at the Berlin State Library: Komaroff, ed., Beyond the Legacy of Genghis Current State of Research and New Perspectives” Khan, Leiden and Boston 2006. conference he co-organized with Julia Gonnella 2 This is an expanded version of a subsection in in June 2013. I also thank Gerhard Wolf for giv- my article, “The Composition and Compilation ing me the opportunity to deliver a longer ver- of Two Saray Albums Reconsidered in Light of sion of my Berlin lecture as guest faculty scholar ‘Frankish’ Images”, in a volume of studies edited at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – by Filiz Çağman and Selmin Kangal, accompa- Max Planck Institute in December 2013, which nying the facsimile of two interrelated Topkapı formed the basis of the present essay. I benefited albums (H. 2153 and H. 2160), MAS Matbaacılık, from comments made on both occasions and by Istanbul (forthcoming, 2016). On the Saray Thomas W. Lentz, who read a draft of this essay. albums, see Ernst Grube, “The Problem of the

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��7 | doi ��.��63/9789004323483_021 Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 532 Necipoğlu album H. 2152, formerly named after the Tabriz.5 The contents of this album, com- bibliophile prince Baysunghur (d. 1433), prising texts and images datable from the has recently been renamed the “Timurid late thirteenth through the early sixteenth workshop album” as its primary audi- century, are thought to have originated ence seems to have been the artists and mainly from the booty of Tabriz, where calligraphers of the royal scriptorium in they had ended up after circulating in Herat. Believed to have been compiled various court treasuries and workshops. there during the first half of the fifteenth These prized materials were compiled century, it mostly contains works from together with others collected in the the early Timurid courts (1370–1506).3 Ottoman palace treasury and work- Europeanizing images mounted in the shop, including early Italian Renaissance Diez albums were likely removed from engravings (c. 1460–80) and Europeanizing this album for Heinrich Friedrich von polychrome painted portraits commonly Diez, the eminent Prussian orientalist associated with the patronage of Sultan and ambassador to the Ottoman court in Mehmed II (r. 1444–46, 1451–81), which are Istanbul (1784–91).4 Since the Diez albums, not considered in the present essay.6 assembled at the turn of the eighteenth- nineteenth centuries, comprise specimens 5 On the compilation of H. 2153 (and its smaller largely detached from manuscripts kept at companion H. 2160) in the court workshop of the Topkapı Palace, they provide only indi- Selim I, and the differing codicological aspects rect clues about the original page layouts of these paired albums, see my forthcom- of these works. ing essay, “The Composition and Compilation of Two Saray Albums”. The hypothesis that As for Topkapı album H. 2153, its folios these two albums may have been assembled at most probably approximated their pres- the Ottoman court, either during the reign of ent layout in the Ottoman court workshop Bayezid II or Selim I, was first put forth in Julian shortly after 1514, when Sultan Selim I Raby, “Mehmed II Fatih and the Fatih Album”, (r. 1512–20) invaded the Safavid capital Islamic Art 1 (1981), pp. 42–49. They were alternatively named the Fatih albums, after the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II (d. 1481), and the Istanbul Album Paintings”, Islamic Art 1 (1981), Yaʿqub Beg (d. 1490) albums, with reference to an pp. 1–30. Aqqoyunlu Turkmen ruler, because of mounted 3 David J. Roxburgh, The Persian Album, 1400–1600, works associated with them. Both labels wrongly New Haven and London 2005, pp. 85–147. There imply that the interrelated albums were com- is no evidence that a single patron prompted this piled for one of these rulers, an implication album’s assembly, pp. 88–90. contradicted by the presence of calligraphies 4 See David J. Roxburgh, “Persian Drawing, c. 1400– dating after their reigns, the latest being from 1450: Materials and Creative Procedures”, AH 917 (1511–12). Therefore in the forthcoming Muqarnas 19 (2002), pp. 44–77, especially p. 73 facsimile publication, they are referred to as n. 67; David J. Roxburgh, “Heinrich Friedrich Von “Saray albums” with inventory numbers H. 2153 Diez and His Eponymous Albums: Mss. Diez and H. 2160. A. Fols. 70–74”, Muqarnas 12 (1995), pp. 115–123, 6 The Italian engravings were collected in especially pp. 122–23. The Diez albums include Mehmed II’s court and not acquired as booty some later works dating from the sixteenth to from Tabriz, as some scholars have speculated: the eighteenth centuries, but these are easily dis- See Necipoğlu, “The Composition and Compi tinguishable from earlier ones. lation of Two Saray Albums”; and Gülru

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H. 2153 can be characterized as a veri- ferred from Tabriz to his own court work- table assemblage of “wonders” (ʿajāʾib), shop must have collaborated with their as it comprises the largest known Islamic Ottoman colleagues in assembling the collection of exotica in the Chinese and bifolios of H. 2153, along with its less mon- European manners.7 It combines works umental companion, H. 2160, which lacks that represent these foreign visual idioms European and Europeanizing works. As with images attributed by inscriptions I have demonstrated elsewhere, large to old and new masters of the Persianate scale images were exclusively mounted in painting tradition, which was collectively H. 2153, with some of their scraps and embraced in the Turko-Mongol dynastic smaller specimens reserved for H. 2160, courts of the eastern Islamic lands. This which is dominated by calligraphy. This unique album thereby constructs an art systematic selection suggests that the historical genealogy within which some respective programs and differing formats specimens of Europeanizing Ottoman of both albums were determined around court painting have been contextualized. the same time. The first and last pages of Selim I was fond of the figurative arts the latter album bear imprints of the oval and aspired to expand the Western hori- sovereignty seal of Selim I (this differs zons of the Persianate painting tradition from his round treasury seal, which con- cultivated in the Ottoman court, much tinued to be used after his death), indicat- like his grandfather Mehmed II, whom he ing that H. 2160 was already a bound codex proclaimed as his role model.8 The group in his reign. By contrast, H. 2153 lacks its of painters and calligraphers he trans first and last pages, which were maybe stamped with seals. Composed of sym- Necipoğlu, “Visual Cosmopolitanism and Cre‑ metrically designed bifolios on both sides, ative Translation: Artistic Conversations with which were possibly intended to be kept in Renaissance Italy in Mehmed II’s Constanti a box, it could have been bound as a vol- nople”, Muqarnas 29 (2012), pp. 1–81; especially ume later in the sixteenth or early seven- pp. 18–20, p. 65 n. 94 and n. 95. teenth centuries.9 7 The only studies that discuss the European While examining the bifolios of this and Europeanizing works are two pioneer- album, dismantled in the twentieth cen- ing essays by Julian Raby: “Mehmed II Fatih tury, I discovered to my surprise a rather and the Fatih Album”, and “Samson and Siyah Qalam”, Islamic Art 1 (1981), pp. 42–49, 160–163. consistent visual logic governing the com- Other studies that briefly touch upon inspira- positional schemes of many facing pages tion drawn from Western European models in in H. 2153, which was previously presumed some images of H. 2153 are J.M. Rogers, “Siyah to have been haphazardly assembled. The Qalam”, in Persian Masters, five centuries of original appearance of these bifolios can painting, ed. Sheila R. Canby, Bombay 1990, pp. be reconstructed on the basis of the con- 21–38; and Bernard O’Kane, “Siyah Qalam: The secutive sequence of their current folio Jalayirid Connections”, Oriental Art 49/2 (2003), numbers; this corresponds to the order pp. 2–18. 8 On Mehmed II as the role model of Selim I and the latter’s interest in the figurative arts, 9 On the differing codicological aspects of these see Necipoğlu, “Visual Cosmopolitanism and paired albums, see Necipoğlu, “The Composition Creative Translation”, pp. 45–52. and Compilation of Two Saray Albums”.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 534 Necipoğlu at the time they were torn apart, which range of colors (black, brown, red, and I have double checked against their match- blue), with highlights in gold and silver. ing tear marks. Only a few intact bifolios Comparable examples in the Diez albums in H. 2153 have not been separated. The (fols. 70–72) and the Topkapı album album’s symmetrically designed bifolios H. 2153 were probably detached from early often feature centerpieces around which fourteenth-century copies of that histori- smaller items are arranged in compara- cal work.11 ble page layouts (U-shaped, L-shaped, or The “black pen” technique has cor- flanking both sides) and in looser com- rectly been interpreted in the scholarship positional schemes.10 The types of image as a Persianate response to Chinese ink brought together in these systematic paintings and woodblock prints, one ini- mise-en-pages invite comparison with one tiated by the Ilkhanids, who were vassals another and evoke suggestive visual paral- of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271–1368), lels. There are no such symmetrically com- under which China became part of a vast posed bifolios in this album’s companion Eurasian imperium. I would like to empha- (H. 2160) and in the Timurid workshop size, however, that this technique also res- album (H. 2152) compiled in the early onates with the grisaille method deployed fifteenth century. Nor do we find com- in late medieval manuscripts and frescoes parable page layouts in the Diez albums, around the same time in the Latin West.12 assembled much later, or for that matter in sixteenth-century Safavid albums. Curiously, early Europeanizing images 11 The “black pen” technique is discussed in Marie Lukens Swietochowski, “Drawing”, of the Istanbul and Berlin albums that Encyclopedia Iranica, vol. 7, 1996, pp. 538–39. will be examined here are all pen and ink On Timurid murals and Jalayirid precedents, drawings, sometimes modeled in colored see Thomas W. Lentz, “Dynastic Imagery washes with touches of gold. This tech- in Early Timurid Wall Painting”, Muqarnas nique, known as “black pen” (qalam-siyāhī, 10 (1993), pp. 251–265. For the Jāmiʿ or siyāh qalam), emerged in the illustrated al-tavārīkh illustrations, see Karin Rührdanz, manuscripts and now-lost mural paint- “Illustrationen zu Rašīd al-Dīn’s Tārīkh-i ings of two successive Mongol dynasties, Mubārak-i Ġazānī in den Berliner Diez- Alben”, in L’Iran face à la domination mongole, the Ilkhanids (1256–1335) and Jalayirids ed. Denise Aigle, Tehran 1997, pp. 295–306; (1335–1432). One of the forerunners of Sheila S. Blair, A Compendium of Chronicles: that technique is a copy of the Ilkhanid Rashid al-Din’s Illustrated History of the World, vizier Rashid al-Din’s Jāmiʿ al-tavārīkh London 1995; Sheila S. Blair, “The Religious (Compendium of Chronicles), produced Art of the Ilkhanids” and Robert Hillenbrand, in Tabriz in AH 714 (1314–15). Its ink and “The Arts of the Book in Ilkhanid Iran”, in wash drawings against a blank background The Legacy of Genghis Khan, pp. 105–167; are both delineated and tinted in a limited Filiz Çağman and Zeren Tanındı, Topkapı Saray Museum: The Albums and Illustrated Manuscripts, ed. J.M. Rogers, Boston 1986, 10 See my reconstructions of bifolios mounted p. 69, pls. 43, 44. with European and Europeanizing images in 12 Examples include French manuscripts in “The Composition and Compilation of Two grisaille illustrated by the Parisian painters Saray Albums”. Matthew the Parisian (c. 1200–59) and Jean

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This parallel may have facilitated transcul- polychrome miniatures, other volumes, tural exchanges through a shared aesthetic and a book in Arabic.13 interest in the expressive qualities of the As is well known, William of Rubruck line. In fact, thirteenth-century French encountered in Qaraqorum a small Roman royal manuscripts – possibly illustrated in Catholic community comprising French- the then fashionable grisaille technique, speaking Hungarians captured in Belgrade with a restricted palette of colored washes in 1241–42. Among them was a Parisian sil- against a blank background – were dis- versmith named Guillaume Boucher, who patched twice to Qaraqorum, the capital of fashioned a silver crucifix worked in the Yuan China, by the crusader king Louis IX “French style” for Qaraqorum’s Christian of France (Saint Louis, r. 1226–70) during community, which included Armenians his sojourn in the Levant. The first time who disapproved of Latin Christian ico- was in 1249, when the king sent gifts from nography. He also sculpted an image Cyprus, then ruled by the French Lusignan of the Virgin, once again in the “French dynasty (1192–1489), including a tent cha- fashion” (more gallicano) and protected pel with Christian depictions, chalices, by two hinged doors with carvings of the and books. The second dispatch in 1253 Gospel history. Master Boucher moreover from Saint Louis’ camp in Palestine was constructed a fountain spouting different via William of Rubruck, a Franciscan friar kinds of liquor at the reception hall of the born in French Flanders, and reached Khan’s palace, consisting of a monumen- the court of Möngke Khan (r. 1251–59) in tal silver tree with four lions at its roots Qaraqorum in 1254. The friar carried with and gilded “serpents” entwined around it, him vestments and illuminated manu- crowned by an angel playing a trumpet.14 scripts, including a Latin Bible donated This may be imagined as a hybrid mechan- by the French king, a richly illuminated ical device, with its lions and serpent- Psalter “with many beautiful pictures” pre- dragons in a Chinese style, and its angel in sented by the queen, a versified vernacu- the French manner. According to Juvayni’s lar Bible profusely illustrated with gilded (d. 1283) History of the World Conqueror, Möngke Khan’s palace pavilions, which were “painted with pictures”, had been

13 The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: Pucelle (c. 1300–55), and an Italian manu- His journey to the court of the Great Khan script produced in Naples during the reign of Möngke, 1253–1255, trans. Peter Jackson with the Angevin king, Robert of Anjou (r. 1309– David Morgan, London 1990; Leonardo 43). See Vicenzo Boni, “Lezioni di Musica: Olschki, Guillaume Boucher: a French artist il Boezio Napoletano,” ALUMINA, 29 (2010), at the court of the Khans, Baltimore 1946; pp. 16–23. Giotto di Bondone (1267–1337) Marianna Shreve Simpson, “Manuscripts and used grisaille in the dadoes of his frescoes in Mongols: Some Documented and Specula‑ the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, completed tive Moments in East-West/Muslim-Christian about 1305; see also grisaille murals dis- Relations, French Historical Studies, 30/3 cussed in Anne Dunlop, Painted Palaces: The (Summer 2007), pp. 351–394. Rise of Secular Art in Early Renaissance Italy, 14 Mission of Friar William of Rubruck, trans. University Park, PA. 2009. Jackson; and Olschki, Guillaume Boucher.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 536 Necipoğlu built by “artisans of every kind [ . . .] mer level under the Ilkhan Abu Saʿid, by brought from Khitai [Cathay], and like- sending letters in 1369 and 1373 that invited wise craftsmen from the lands of Islam,” in merchants to Tabriz and offered them road their respective styles.15 These precedents security as well as reduced dues, commer- must certainly have left a lasting mark cial traffic dwindled. Following the demise on the taste for foreign styles and visual of Sultan Uvays and the Timurid inva- hybridity in subsequent Mongol dynas- sions shortly after, no trace was left of the ties who converted to Islam, such as the Venetian and Genoese merchant colonies Ilkhanids and Jalayirids, the Turko-Mongol in Iran.16 The Jalayirid capitals Tabriz and Timurids, and their Turkmen successors Baghdad continued to function as major (including the Qaraqoyunlu, Aqqoyunlu, emporia, but from then on the centers of and Ottoman dynasties). international trade shifted to the Mamluk ports of Syria-Egypt and to Ottoman Bursa.17 The Taste for Frankish Fashions While scholars have been eager to study in Post-Mongol Court Cultures the artistic exchanges of medieval Islamic

The thriving Christian communities of 16 Jacques Paviot, “Les marchands italiens dans European merchants – primarily Genoese l’empire mongol”, in L’Iran face à la domina and Venetian, but also Pisan, French, and tion mongole: études, ed. Denise Aigle, Tehran Catalan – in the Ilkhanid capitals of Iran 1997, pp. 84; Luciano Petech, “Les march- (Tabriz and Sultaniya) and other urban ands italiens dans l’empire mongol”, Journal Asiatique 250 (1962), pp. 549–574, especially centers diminished rapidly with the anar- pp. 569–570; and Wilhelm Heyd, Histoire du chy following the death of this Mongol commerce du Levant au Moyen-Âge, trans. F. dynasty’s last ruler, Sultan Abu Saʿid Raynaud, 2 vols., Leipzig 1885–86, reprint (r. 1316–35). The downturn was intensi- Amsterdam 1959, vol. 2, pp. 64–140, espe- fied by unsafe road conditions and the cially pp. 128–131. On post-Mongol Tabriz, catastrophic effects of the Black Death in see Judith Pfeiffer, Politics, Patronage, and Europe between 1348 and 1350. Although the Transmission of Knowledge in 13th–15th the Jalayirid ruler Sultan Uvays I (r. 1356–74) Century Tabriz, Leiden and Boston 2014. 17 In addition to n. 16 above, see Abu-Lughod, tried to restore trade with Venice to its for- Before European Hegemony; Tom Sinclair, “Some Conclusions on the Use of Coins on 15 ʿAla-ad-Din ʿAta-Malik Juvaini, The History the Ayas-Tabriz Route”, in At the Crossroads of of the World-Conqueror, translated by John Empires: 14th–15th Century Eastern Anatolia, Andrew Boyle from the text of Mirza ed. Deniz Beyazıt, Istanbul and Paris 2012, Muhammad Qazvini, 2 vols., Manchester, UK pp. 87–103; Rosamond E. Mack, Bazaar to 1958, vol. 1, pp. 236–239. The terms “Khitai” Piazza: Islamic Trade and Italian Art, 1300– and “Khitayan” in this context may specifi- 1600, Berkeley, University of California Press, cally refer to the Khitans in the Khitai region 2001, pp. 10–24; Şerafettin Turan, Türkiye- of Mongolia, recently conquered by Möngke İtalya İlişkileri. I. Selçuklu’lardan Bizans’ın Khan. On the transnationalism of Yuan cul- sona erişine, Ankara, Kültür ve Turizm ture, see Shane McCausland, The Mongol Bakanlığı Yayınları, 2000; Halil İnalcık, Century: Visual Cultures of Yuan China, 1271– “Bursa: XV. Asır Sanayi ve Ticâret Tarihine 1368, London 2014. Dair Vesikalar”, Belleten 24 (1960).

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 537 courts with Byzantium and other Eastern Timurid works from the turn of the four- Christian communities, there is a general teenth-fifteenth centuries, especially in the resistance to assess the growing impact depictions of winged angels, have down- of Frankish visual culture in the post- played these elements and shied away Mongol period.18 Parallels have been noted from scrutinizing their visual sources.20 between the increased naturalism of the The fascination in late fourteenth- late Gothic and the Jalayirid styles, but century Islamic courts with Frankish figu- entertaining the possibility of a cross- rative arts is well attested in the Ottoman cultural exchange with the Latin West capital Bursa, under Sultan Bayezid I tends to be rejected in favor of Chinese (r. 1389–1402). After crushing the crusader “influence” and “contacts” with indigenous armies at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396, this Christian painters.19 Even studies that ruler demanded a ransom of figural tapes- acknowledge the presence of Western tries produced in Arras (northern France), European elements in Jalayirid and early depicting “appropriate ancient histories,” in exchange for the captive son of Philip 18 For instance, a study on the Byzantine sources the Bold, the founder of the Valois Duchy of early fourteenth-century illustrations in of Burgundy (1364–1477). In response to the Jāmiʿ al-tavārīkh mentions Rashid al-Din’s the request, the duke sent, among other correspondence and exchange of books with items, a series of the finest-quality Arras Western scholars, but categorically asserts tapestries portraying “the history of King that manuscripts from Europe did not pro- Alexander [the Great], with the major vide models for this work. See Terry Allen, part of his life and his conquests.”21 One “Byzantine Sources for the Jāmiʿ al-Tawārīkh of Rashīd al-Dīn”, Ars Orientalis 15 (1985), pp. 121–136, especially p. 122. The availability 20 On Europeanizing Jalayirid angels, see in Rashid al-Din’s scriptorium in Tabriz of Deborah E. Klimburg-Salter, “A Sufi Theme Chinese handscrolls and woodblock printed in Persian Painting: The Dīwān of Sultan books, Byzantine religious manuscripts, and Aḥmad Ǧalāʾir in the Freer Gallery of Art, Frankish vernacular histories, as models for Washington D.C.”, Kunst des Orients 11/1–2 the Jāmiʿ al-tavārīkh, is hypothesized with- (1976/1977), pp. 43–84; and Frederik Robert out providing concrete examples in Blair, Martin, Miniatures from the Period of Timur A Compendium of Chronicles, pp. 45–54, p. 64, in a Ms. of the Poems of Sultan Ahmad Jalair, pp. 68–69. Blair states that the Great Mongol Vienna 1926. For the marginal illuminations Shāhnāma reveals “inspiration of Italian with angels of a Timurid dispersed Shāhnāma works by the likes of Simone Martini, attributed to Herat (c. 1425–50) which “betray Lorenzetti, and their contemporaries”, and European influence” from Italy or Flanders, a “willingness to echo contemporary Italian see Thomas W. Lentz and Glenn D. Lowry, and French art”, but again without substan- Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and tiating these claims: see her “Religious Art of Culture in the Fifteenth Century, Los Angeles the Ilkhanids”, pp. 112–124, pp. 162–165. and Washington, D.C. 1989, pp. 128–129. 19 Dorothea Duda, “Die Buchmalerei der 21 Jean Froissart, Collection des chroniques natio Ğalā‘iriden (1. Teil)”, Islam, 48 (1972), pp. 28– nales françaises: Chroniques de Froissart, ed. 76, especially pp. 55–56; “Die Buchmalerei J.A. Buchon, vol. 13, Paris 1825, p. 401, p. 408, der Ğalā‘iriden (2. Teil): Die Malerei in Tabrīz p. 412, p. 417, especially pp. 420, 422. The tap- unter Sulṭān Uwais und Ḥusain”, Islam 49 estries that were associated with Bayezid I’s (1972), pp. 153–220, especially pp. 165–215. claim to be the new Alexander are discussed

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 538 Necipoğlu of those Alexander tapestries was carted in the differing geo-political context of the as booty from the Ottoman royal treasury Islamic West, depict courtly themes, echo- in Bursa to Timur’s capital Samarqand, ing the imagery of the French tapestries after he had vanquished Bayezid I at the that so captivated Ottoman and Timurid Battle of Ankara in 1402. The Damascene beholders alike. Their secular subject Arab chronicler Ahmad ibn Muhammad matter ranges from a meeting of seated ibn ʿArabshah, who had been forced in his Nasrid amirs to mythology, hunting, jousts youth to move to Samarqand upon Timur’s between Christian and Muslim knights invasion of Syria, admired this ten-cubit- distinguished by heraldic coats of arm, and wide “curtain” featuring inscriptions and representations of noble men courting or lifelike representations of humans and ani- playing chess with attractive blond ladies mals against naturalistic landscapes with dressed in fashionable Frankish attire. architectural monuments. Declaring the Imbued with the iconography of chivalry tapestry “one of the wonders of the world,” and courtly love, these visual narratives whose “fame is naught to the sight of it,” he are enacted against a background of castel- praised its figural images, which appeared lated palaces, from whose Gothic-arched almost animated: “with their mobile faces open belvederes amorous couples and they seemed to hold secret converse with ladies gaze at exuberant landscapes with you and the fruits seemed to approach as fountains, birds, roaming animals, and though bending to be plucked.”22 wild beasts.24 Such Europeanizing mural A similar enthusiasm for naturalistic paintings were apparently widespread in imagery in the International Gothic style the mansions and palaces of Nasrid al- (c. 1360–1433) is also attested in Nasrid Andalus according to the North African Granada, another Islamic capital situated scholar Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406). He some- along the fluid frontier with Christendom, what scornfully regarded these pictures on like Ottoman Bursa. In the Alhambra walls and the adoption of “Galician” cloth- Palace, the Hall of Justice, within the Court ing fashions as signs of foreign domination: of the Lions, attributed to Muhammad V (c. 1362–91), features three contiguous vaulted ceilings adorned with polychrome figural paintings on leather in a medieval 24 On the early development of a culture of European style.23 These paintings, created “courtly love” in eleventh-century al-Andalus, and parallels between the themes of Arabic with additional bibliography in Necipoğlu, Taifa poetry and the Provençal literary tra- “Visual Cosmopolitanism and Creative Trans dition, see Cynthia Robinson, In Praise of lation”, pp. 3–4. Song: The Making of a Courtly Culture in al- 22 Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad Ibn ʿArabshāh, Andalus and Provence, 1005–1134 A.D., Leiden Tamerlane, or Timur, the Great Amir, trans. 2002. For thirteenth- and fourteenth-century J.H. Sanders, London 1936, pp. 216–217. “contacts” between the “courtly cultures” of 23 See essays in Cynthia Robinson and Simone Iberia and southwestern France, with refer- Pine, eds., “Courting the Alhambra: Cross- ence to the genre of “idyllic romances”, see Disciplinary Approaches to the Hall of Justice Cynthia Robinson, Medieval Andalusian Ceilings”, Special Issue, Medieval Encounters Courtly Culture in the Mediterranean: Ḥadīth 14/2–3 (2008). Bayāḍ wa Riyāḍ, London and New York 2007.

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The [Muslim] Spaniards are found to only a few original images from China and assimilate themselves to the Galician the Latin West.27 Instead, they are domi- nations in their dress, their emblems, nated by the works of ethnically diverse and most of their customs and condi- Persianate artists, who copied or created tions. This goes so far that they even hybrid interpretations of models from draw pictures on the walls and [have both artistic traditions. That the same them] in buildings and houses. The terms could also be epithets or nicknames intelligent observer will draw from of artists working in those particular man- this the conclusion that it is a sign of ners is suggested in Dihkhuda’s modern domination [by others].25 Persian dictionary, which simultaneously defines farangī-sāzī as an individual who While drawing such a conclusion may works in a European manner and a work well have been justified, Ibn Khaldun made in a European style.28 overlooked the reciprocity of artistic We do not know when and where the exchanges between the Nasrids and their attributions were written, but most of Castilian allies, both of whom deployed a them are in similar hands and seem to have shared language of courtly culture.26 been added close to the time the albums Europeanizing ink drawings mounted were compiled, sometime between the in the Berlin and Istanbul albums provide fifteenth century and the early decades further evidence for a hitherto underesti- of the sixteenth. One may speculate mated engagement with figural imagery that those in H. 2153 and its companion from the Latin West in Persianate court H. 2160 could partly have been written by workshops around the same time. The existence of a global perspective encom- 27 The Mongol word for China is Khitai, from passing both China and Europe is, in fact, which Cathay originates; the term may have suggested by the attributive inscriptions of been derived from the “Khitan people who these albums, which identify some images ruled north China as the Liao dynasty”, see as “Cathayan work” (kār-i khaṭāy/khiṭāy) McCausland, The Mongol Century, 8. Here and others as “Frankish work” (kār-i I am using the term China generically; Yuan farang/firang). I interpret the two terms China comprised lands in Mongolia, Inner and Southeast Asia. as “work in the Cathayan (Chinese) man- 28 In her article on the genre of Europeanizing ner” and “work in the Frankish (European) painting in late Safavid Iran, Landau cites manner,” given that the albums contain ʿAlī-ʿAkbar Dihkhudā’s, Lughatnāmah, 15 vols., Tehran 1372–73 (1993–94): Amy S. Landau, 25 Ibn Khaldūn, The Muqaddimah, trans. Franz “From Poet to Painter: Allegory and Metaphor Rosenthal, 3 vols., Princeton, N.J. 1980, vol. 1, in a Seventeenth-Century Persian Painting by p. 300. Muhammad Zaman, Master of Farangī-Sāzī”, 26 On reciprocal artistic exchanges, see Muqarnas 28 (2011), pp. 101–131. A Timurid Robinson and Pine, eds., “Courting the workshop petition from c. 1427–28, included Alhambra”; and Jerrilyn D. Dodds, María Rosa in H. 2153 (fol. 98r), does mention an art- Menocal, and Abigail Krasner Balbale, The ist whose name was “Khaṭāʾī”: Wheeler M. Arts of Intimacy: Christians, Jews and Muslims Thackston, Album Prefaces and Other Docu in the Making of Castilian Culture, New Haven ments on the History of Calligraphers and and London 2008. Painters, Leiden 2001, pp. 43–46, on p. 43.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 540 Necipoğlu the Safavid painter-decorators and callig- tan Ahmed I in the early seventeenth cen- raphers that Selim I imported from Tabriz, tury is, in my view, unfounded.30 who likely worked together with their According to David Roxburgh, attribu- Ottoman counterparts in mounting and tive inscriptions in the Diez albums are near reformatting the gathered materials on contemporary additions in the same or their current bifolios. It was probably they similar hands, consistent with a date early who added new attributive inscriptions in the 1400s, like those of the Timurid to preexisting ones. In fact, some previ- workshop album from which they prob- ously written attributions were cropped ably originate.31 It is nevertheless pos- during that process.29 The attributive and sible that some of the inscriptions could evaluative inscriptions are all in Persian have been added in late Timurid Herat. In (except for two early seventeenth-century these albums, aesthetic appraisals appear marginal notes in Turkish scribbled by or mainly on calligraphies, and there are rela- for Sultan Ahmed I). Sometimes comple- tively few images with written attributions mented by qualitative appraisals and to artists. This emerging practice may have aesthetic judgments, they often display gained momentum with two no-longer- specialized expertise. Such connoisseurial extant late Timurid albums, only the remarks were informed by the collec- prefaces of which have survived. Despite tive workshop memory and knowledge of the brevity of both prefaces, the lost con- Persianate practitioners familiar with the tents of those albums could have featured artworks mounted in the albums, which more extensive inscriptions, signaling a native Ottoman painters were unlikely growing attention to connoisseurship and to have possessed. Therefore the hypoth- authorship.32 esis that most attributions in H. 2153 and H. 2160 were written by the Ottoman sul- 30 See Necipoğlu, “The Composition and Com pilation of Two Saray Albums”. 31 On inscriptions with artist’s names in the Diez and Timurid workshop albums, see 29 See Necipoğlu, “The Composition and Com Roxburgh, The Persian Album, p. 338 n. 104; pilation of Two Saray Albums”. According to Ernst Kühnel, “Malernamen in den Berliner Basil Robinson, when the works assembled “Saray” Alben”, Kunst des Orients 3 (1959), in these two albums around 1514 arrived in pp. 66–77. The Timurid workshop album Istanbul as booty from Tabriz, they were (H. 2152) was reconstructed between 1790 probably “loose drawings” in folders with and c. 1909 after the removal of its contents, some form of identification of artists writ- which are now pasted in the Diez albums ten on them: see Basil W. Robinson, “The (fols. 70–73); see Roxburgh, “Diez and his Turkman School to 1503”, in The Arts of Eponymous Albums”, pp. 122–123. the Book in Central Asia, ed. Basil Gray, 32 One of these prefaces was written in 1492 by Boulder, CO. 1979, pp. 215–247, especially the Timurid stylist of Herat, Marvarid, for an p. 243. Another possible scenario is that the album owned by Mir ʿAli Shir Navaʾi‌ (d. 1501); materials acquired from Tabriz consisted of the other preface was composed by the his- some unbound bifolios with already pasted torian Khvandamir (d. c. 1535) for an album items, accompanied by mostly loose speci- of painting and calligraphy assembled by mens in folders that were assembled in the the painter Bihzad. See Thackston, Album Ottoman court workshop. Prefaces, pp. 22–23, and pp. 41–42. Moreover,

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Since the Timurid workshop album To return to the terms “Frankish” and (H. 2152), believed to have been compiled “Cathayan,” they certainly coexisted as earlier in Herat, bears on fol. 3r the imprint stylistic categories from at least Timurid of Selim I’s oval sovereignty seal (used times. For instance, in his Chaghatay- only during his lifetime), it too was in his Turkish literary work titled Maḥbūb possession. However, there is no evident al-ḳulūb (The Beloved of Hearts), which sign of additions to the contents or inscrip- was written in 1500–01 and includes a sec- tions of this album at the Ottoman court, in tion on different professions, the Turkic contrast to the pair of interrelated Topkapı poet and statesman of Timurid Herat, albums (H. 2153 and H. 2160) compiled Mir ʿAli-Shir Navaʾi‌ (d. 1501), expects later, around 1514. The notable prolifera- the skilled “illuminator” (mudhahhib) tion of attributive inscriptions and quali- to master the “Cathayan” (khaṭāʾī) and tative appraisals in these paired albums “Frankish” ( farangī) manners.34 The same testifies to an augmented art historical two designations appear in an earlier consciousness, which would subsequently become codified in Dust Muhammad’s the paired albums H. 2153 and H. 2160 (c. 1514) preface to another Saray album, dedicated and the earlier Timurid workshop album in 1544–45 to the Safavid prince Bahram (H. 2152), which were kept at the royal trea- Mirza (H. 2154). Nevertheless, the specula- sury (Hazine, hence their inventory num- tion that some inscriptions of earlier Saray bers beginning with “H”), remained largely albums (H. 2152, H. 2153 and H. 2160) might inaccessible beyond the inner court circles have been added in the late sixteenth or of the Topkapı Palace. The highly privileged Safavid master of the Cathayan man- seventeenth century, after the Bahram ner and “black pen” technique, Shah Qulı, Mirza album reached the Ottoman court, who joined the Ottoman court scriptorium seems rather unlikely.33 under Sultan Süleyman in 1520 and served as the chief of the corps of painter-decorators biographies of artists suddenly appeared in from the 1540s until his death in 1556, may late-Timurid chronicles and biographical have gained access to the contents of these anthologies of poets. early albums. But he died before the arrival 33 For this hypothesis, see Friederike Weis’s of the Bahram Mirza album in Istanbul, article in the present volume, in which she probably after the Ottoman-Safavid peace proposes that the signatures and attributions treaty signed at Amasya in 1555. While the related to Muhammad al-Khayyam in H. 2152 few artists who were Privy Chamber pages and in the Diez albums were added in the or royal “intimates”, may have consulted the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century at three early Saray albums, the rarified con- the Ottoman court. We do not know exactly text in which they were kept considerably when the Bahram Mirza album entered the reduced their accessibility to ordinary court Topkapı Palace treasury collection. Even if it painters like Vali Jan, another Safavid mas- arrived as a gift in the mid to late sixteenth ter of the “black pen” technique who joined century, I doubt that practitioners of the the Ottoman court workshop in the early Ottoman court workshop at that time pos- 1580s; see Necipoğlu, “The Composition and sessed the necessary connoisseurial expertise Compilation of Two Saray Albums”. or even ambition to identify album images 34 ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī, Mahbûbü’l-kulûb: İnceleme- with such detailed attributive inscriptions, metin-sözlük, ed. Zuhak Kargı Ölmez, PhD in contrast to their predecessors. Moreover, diss. Hacettepe Üniversitesi, Ankara 1993,

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Timurid text, this time in Persian, by ʿAbd in European Attire. This image, analyzed al-Razzaq Samarqandi, in which he des in the next section, is reasonably iden- cribes his embassy in 1442–44 to Calicut tified by an inscription as a “Frankish and Vijayanagar on behalf of the ruler work” (kār-i farang) (fig. 20.1). Yet several of Herat, Shahrukh. A temple the author distinctly Sinicizing ink drawings in the encounters in India is eulogized as hav- Diez and Topkapı albums have been ing been carved entirely with wonderful labeled Frankish works, unlike European “Frankish and Cathayan designs” (naqsh-i izing ones, which are never confused in farangī va khaṭāʾī).35 Only mentioning the the albums as Cathayan. For instance, the term khaṭāʾī, the Timurid painter Ghiyas inscription “Frankish work” (kār-i farang) al-Din Naqqash expressed a similar admi- in nastaʿlīq script appears on two Sinicizing ration for the lifelike figural imagery of images in H. 2153: one of them is an early Chinese “idol temples” he encountered fourteenth-century Mongol Ilkhanid audi- during an embassy to the Ming court that ence scene (fol. 23v); the other is an early left Herat in 1419, returning in 1422.36 Both fifteenth-century black ink drawing of a terms, then, could sometimes, though not standing Chinese woman holding a floral always, signify somewhat foreign, won- spray (fol. 112r). Another example of a drous naturalistic representations with an misattribution in a different naskh hand exotic flavor. However, such metaphori- in the Diez albums, reading “Frankish cal literary uses should not imply that work,” accompanies a Timurid black ink “Frankish” and “Cathayan” were indiscrim- drawing (c. 1400–30) in the Cathayan man- inately applied to any foreign style. ner, which depicts two Daoist Immortals Attributive inscriptions in the Berlin (Liu Haichan and Li Tieguai) pointing at and Istanbul albums indicate that the two a toad (Diez A fol. 73, p. 55, no. 2a). This terms were well established, despite their shows that the confusion was common, occasional imprecision. Europeanizing and not confined to H. 2153. If the latter ink and wash drawings in the albums are drawing was extracted from the Timurid left unattributed, except for one exam- workshop album, like several others in ple, which I have named Eight Figures the Diez albums, the confusion may well have originated in Herat. Since indigenous Ottoman artists were generally well p. 226, fol. 62v; ʿAlī Shīr Navāʾī, Maḥbūb al-ḳulūb, Istanbul 1889, p. 119. acquainted with European images, such 35 Wheeler M. Thackston, A Century of misattributions were more likely inscribed Princes: Sources on Timurid History and Art, by Iranian artists affiliated either with the Cambridge, MA. 1989, p. 75. Timurid, Turkmen, or early Safavid courts, 36 Thackston, A Century of Princes, pp. 279–297. or perhaps with that of Selim I. The images See also David J. Roxburgh, “The ‘Journal’ mislabeled as Frankish may have appeared of Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash, Timurid Envoy more foreign or exotic to them than those to Khan Balïgh, and Chinese Art and Cathayan works with which they were Architecture”, in Power of Things and the Flow of Cultural Transformations: Art and Culture familiar. Between Europe and Asia, ed. Lieselotte E. These two foreign traditions of depic- Saurma-Jeltsch and Anja Eisenbeiss, Berlin tion seem to have been considered in a way 2010, pp. 90–113, especially pp. 97, 110. commensurate with each other because

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 543 of a shared, yet differently accomplished, reflect upon Persianate ink drawings from emphasis on naturalism. This commensu- c. 1350 to 1450 that exemplify the Frankish rability explains why elements from both manner in the strict sense. Although my traditions were seamlessly woven together primary interest in them is not driven by in hybrid works mounted in the albums. connoisseurship, formal analysis is indis- It also explains the concomitant impre- pensable as a means to contextualize these cision of their attributive inscriptions. unfamiliar album images; I then address I suggest a date not later than the first their broader implications in the epilogue. decades of the sixteenth century for these inscriptions, judging by the greater preci- sion with which both stylistic categories Late Medieval Persianate Ink came to be used from the mid-sixteenth Drawings in the Frankish century onward in Safavid, Ottoman, and Manner: The Jalayirid Tradition Mughal primary sources.37 In the following section, I individually examine and Like its Byzantine counterpart in Greek, pharangoi, the term farang generally 37 Yves Porter, “ ‘From the Theory of the Two referred to Western Europeans, but it Qalams’ to the ‘Seven Principles of Painting’: could sometimes specifically allude to Theory, Terminology, and Practice in Persian the French or Italians who, upon the cre- Classical Painting”, Muqarnas 17 (2000), ation of the Latin Empire (1204–1261) pp. 109–118, especially pp. 113–114; and after the Fourth Crusade, came to domi- Gülru Necipoğlu, “Early Modern Floral: nate the Levant during the thirteenth and The Agency of Ornament in Ottoman and Safavid Visual Cultures”, in Gülru Necipoğlu fourteenth centuries.38 It was within this and Alina Payne, eds., Histories of Ornament: context that the Frankish manner began From Global to Local, Princeton, N.J. 2016, to supplant Byzantine and other Eastern pp. 132–155. Interestingly, the term “rūmī ” typ- Christian artistic traditions, as one of ically used in medieval texts is conflated with the preferred foreign visual idioms that “farangī ” in a mid-sixteenth-century Safavid Persianate artists drew upon for inspira- version of the famous parable of a contest tion. One of several channels of trans- between Byzantine-Greek and Chinese mission for French and Italian sartorial painters, now involving “Chinese-Cathayan” fashions or luxury objects in the Ilkhanid and “Greek (rūmī)-Frankish ( farang)” figural painters (ṣūrat-garān), in which the former and Jalayirid domains could have been the triumph; see ʿAbdī Beg Shirāzī (Navīdī), Āyīn-i Iskandarī, ed. A. Rahimov, Moscow 1977, 38 On the term “pharangoi”, see Peter Lock, pp. 107–12; discussed in Gülru Necipoğlu, The Franks in the Aegean, 1204–1500, London “The Scrutinizing Gaze in the Aesthetics of and New York 1995, p. 8. French culture was Islamic Visual Cultures: Sight, Insight and the dominating influence throughout the Desire”, Muqarnas 32 (2015), pp. 23–61, on thirteenth century and to a lesser degree p. 48, guest edited by Olga Bush and Avinoam in the next century, which saw the rising Shalem, containing the proceedings of their dominance of Italians in the Levant (p. 107). conference “Gazing Otherwise: Modalities French customs and tastes were also adopted of Seeing” held at the Kunsthistorisches in the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, which Institut-Max Planck Institut, Florence, on between 1342 and 1375 was ruled by the pro- 10–12 October 2012. Latin, Frankish Lusignan Kingdom of Cyprus.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 544 Necipoğlu trading networks of the Angevin kingdom idioms.39 In general, the ink drawings seem of Naples (1266–1435), a dynasty of French to have more closely recorded the foreign origin whose cultural influence extended subjects of their putative prototypes than throughout the eastern Mediterranean their styles. The marked emphasis on and beyond. A related northern channel outline and contour is a symptom of the of dissemination may have been Angevin concern with the legibility of the model. Hungary, which under King Louis the Yet this observation is complicated by Great (r. 1342–82) encompassed a vast ter- the tendency of some, if not all, artists to ritory from the Black Sea to the Adriatic. modify both the style and subject matter The king even temporarily occupied of their foreign sources in works that can Naples when his brother was murdered best be characterized as creative transla- there. tions. The purposes of album drawings As noted above, Eight Figures in Euro in the Frankish manner range from study pean Attire is the only Europeanizing exercises, and copies of motifs for use in ink and wash drawing in the Diez and other compositions, to finished works of Istanbul albums that bears the attribu- art made for their own sake. tion “Frankish work” (kār-i farang), and Eight Figures in European Attire, com- correctly so (figs. 20.1, 20.2a–d). Rendered prising isolated individuals lined up on a strip-like, horizontal band of brown- next to one another without interaction, ish paper, it portrays standing figures appears to have been a figure study focus- characterized by Frankish physiognomy, ing particularly on costumes. The late hairstyle and attire. The black ink drawing medieval clothes, headgear, and archaic with clear contour lines, sometimes delin- Crusader-type armaments, such as the eated in blue and red, is subtly modeled swords and small round shield, are charac- by means of colored washes in gray, blue, teristic of a period before the end of the and pink, which give volume to the figures. fourteenth century, when more closely fit- Awkwardly drawn necks and shoulders ted and shorter-length male attire became suggest that this is not the original work the norm. The two standing figures wear- of a “Frank,” as a literal translation of the ing robes modeled in blue and pink washes attribution implies, but rather a “work are women with somewhat masculine in the Frankish manner.” The attributive physiognomies (figs. 20.2a, 20.2b). The one inscription may alternatively refer to the in profile holds a fruit basket and wears a epithet of an artist working in that man- tiara, her hair in a ponytail hanging down ner, whether a “Frank” or not. her back. The remaining six monochrome The drawing can be ascribed to a Per male figures, by contrast, are all worked sianate court painter who seems to have in gray wash. The falconer on the far had access to a Frankish model in grisaille, probably French or Italian. This raises 39 On “models” in the Latin West, see Robert W. the question of whether album images Scheller, Exemplum: Model-Book Drawings in the Frankish manner embody drawing and the Practice of Artistic Transmission in the techniques determined by their models Middle Ages (ca. 900–ca. 1450), trans. Michael or instead reflect the artists’ own stylistic Hoyle, Amsterdam 1995.

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Figure 20.1 Eight Figures in European Attire, Baghdad or Tabriz, c. 1370. Istanbul, TSMK, H. 2153, fol. 54v. Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 546 Necipoğlu

Figures 20.2a–d Details from Eight Figures in European Attire. Istanbul, TSMK, H. 2153, fol. 54v.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 547 right wears a Latin scull-cap (coif ) and a vertical working lines drawn in black ink long robe partly covered by a cape, as he are visible on the standing falconer, whose clutches a little bird in one hand, with a fal- cape crosses over the gold rulings that con perched on the other hand (fig. 20.2d).40 were subsequently added to frame this Based on internal stylistic grounds, horizontal study sheet as a prized artwork Bernard O’Kane has plausibly assigned this worth preserving (fig. 20.2d). previously published album drawing to Written by the same hand as that of the Jalayirid courts in Tabriz and Baghdad the Europeanizing drawing, an attribu- c. 1350–70.41 The crosshatched rectangu- tive inscription in nastaʿlīq script on the lar panels decorating the chests and arms adjacent Shāhnāma painting identifies of some costumes accord well with this it as the “work of Master Ahmad Musa” attribution, as crosshatching is one of the (kār-i ustād Aḥmad Mūsā). According to diagnostic features he enumerates among an oft-quoted passage from the calligra- the characteristics of the Jalayirid style. A pher Dust Muhammad’s preface to the more precise date around the 1370s may Bahram Mirza album, this pioneering be suggested by my reconstruction of the court painter of the last Ilkhanid ruler, bifolio on which Eight Figures in European Abu Saʿid (d. 1335), revolutionized figural Attire is mounted. It has U-shaped, sym- painting through an unprecedented natu- metrical layouts on both facing pages, ralism, paralleling that of the Frankish and each organized around a central painting Cathayan depiction traditions, inventing from the same Jalayirid Shāhnāma, dat- the painting style still current at the mid- able to the 1370s (figs. 20.3a and b). The sixteenth-century Safavid court.42 Several Europeanizing drawing is pasted adjacent images in H. 2153 are attributed by inscrip- to one of those Shāhnāma paintings, with tions to Master Ahmad Musa, who may which it may well be coeval. The two con- have continued to work under the patron- tiguous images are framed by partly dam- age of the Jalayirids.43 On the page facing aged, nearly identical rulings that were created before both works were removed from their original support and mounted 42 Thackston, Album Prefaces, p. 12. The Jalayirid Shāhnāma is attributed by some scholars to in the present album page (a thin and a Master Ahmad Musa’s pupil, Shams al-Din, thick gold stripe, edged in black lines and based on Dust Muhammad’s preface, stat- an outer line in lapis lazuli). Three parallel ing that he painted a Shāhnāma; see Barbara Brend, Muhammad Juki’s Shahnama of 40 While some falconers depicted in Frederick II’s Firdausi, London 2010, p. 12. falconry book De arte venandi cum avibus 43 Dust Muhammad’s album preface does not (The Art of Hunting with Birds, 1240s) also make it clear whether Ahmad Musa, who wear medieval skull-caps and short or long was trained by his father in the late Ilkhanid robes with a cape, these are polychrome illus- period, continued to be active under the trations painted with opaque pigments in a Jalayirid ruler Sultan Uvays I (r. 1356–74). relatively archaic style. See Ms. Pal. Lat. 1071, Priscilla Soucek has assumed a long career Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. to reconcile Ahmad Musa’s hand with manu- 41 O’Kane, “Siyah Qalam: The Jalayirid Connec scripts created under Sultan Uvays; discussed tions”, pp. 2–18. in Bernard, O’Kane, Early Persian Painting:

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Figures 20.3a and 20.3b Symmetrical bifolio with U-shaped page layouts around two centrally placed paintings from a Jalayirid Shāhnāma of Firdawsi, Baghdad or Tabriz, 1370s. Istanbul, TSMK, H. 2153, fols. 55r–54v.

that of Eight Figures in European Attire, an from the same period.44 Some attribu- attribution identifies a small painting as tions to Master Ahmad Musa are accom- the “work of Ahmad Lajin,” who was either panied by aesthetic appraisals in Persian. a contemporary of the fourteenth-century For instance, one of the paintings from painter Ahmad Musa, or maybe Ahmad the Jalayirid Shāhnāma is inscribed in Musa himself. Both pages on the reverse of the bifolio have similar U-shaped, sym- 44 These attributions “in a later hand” are metrical layouts (H. 2153, fols. 54r, 55v). accepted as plausible in Adel T. Adamova, One of their centrally positioned paint- Medieval Persian Painting: Evolution of ings is from the same Jalayirid Shāhnāma, an Artistic Vision, trans. J.M. Rogers, New inscribed “pen (qalam) of Ahmad Lajin.” York 2008, p. 35. Referring to the Jalayirid This indicates that the recto and verso of Shāhnāma paintings, she writes: “Their the bifolio, like many others in that album, author must have been either Ahmad Musa were mounted with closely related works himself, or a pupil and contemporary of equal talent”. For attributions to Ahmad Musa, see H. 2153, fols. 16v, 22v, 23r, 28r, 28v, 35r, 54v, Kalila wa Dimna Manuscripts of the Late 85v, 157r. Attributions to Ahmad Lajin are Fourteenth Century, London and New York in H. 2153, fols. 55r, 55v, 72r, 107r, 112r, 112v, 2003, p. 238. 134r, 157v. On the Jalayirid Shāhnāma, see

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 549 a nastaʿlīq hand as the “work of Ahmad face. The beast is ascending a steep rocky Musa, it is made exceedingly well” (fol. 35r, cliff from a deep gorge, with an abbrevi- kār-i Aḥmad Mūsā bi-ghāyat khūb sākhta ated waterscape below (denoted in the ast). The painting of a wintry landscape foreground by waterfowl among bamboo with two riding hunters is identified in a shoots), toward a celestial sphere of con- similar hand as “work of Master Ahmad centric circles, which is ringed by an efful- Musa, very good!” (fol. 28r, kār-i Ustād gent blue halo and Chinese cloud bands, Aḥmad Mūsā bisyār nīk). or fiery swirls denoting light. The elusive Another published ink and wash draw- gleaming object hovering in the sky that ing mounted in H. 2153, labeled here as the dragon is reaching out to clutch may be Celestial Vision, has likewise been attrib- identified as a flaming pearl of perfection uted to Jalayirid Baghdad or Tabriz and amidst clouds, a metaphor of transcendent dated to around the last quarter of the wisdom and spiritual enlightenment.47 fourteenth century (fig. 20.4).45 I interpret The upper left side of Celestial Vision, this image as the product of an uninhibited on the other hand, depicts a Christian fusion of Europeanizing and Sinicizing ele- scene of enlightenment. It represents the ments. It is a highly accomplished, finished miraculous appearance to two men atop work of art rendered on brownish paper a mountain of a fiery six-winged seraph in black ink, with gray and blue washes. (lit. “burning one,” or high-ranking angelic Framed by elaborate rulings in gold, black, being near the Divine Throne). One of the and lapis lazuli, it features a vertical fold men is standing in awe with raised hands, mark in the middle. The vibrant energy of while the other is fearfully recoiling on the this tinted “black pen” image reverberates with the album’s corpus of polychrome paintings from the Jalayirid Shāhnāma. 47 I thank Eugene Y. Wang for bringing to my One of the Shāhnāma-related images attention the Nine Dragons handscroll in in the same album, depicting the hero black ink with touches of red on paper, dated Rustam killing a dragon, is even worked in 1244 and signed by the Southern Song art- the “black pen” technique.46 ist Chen Rong (active 1235–62). It features a On the right side of the Sinicizing double-horned dragon that has just “grasped the pearl of wisdom” emitting cloudlike landscape of Celestial Vision, a bent tree flames or light. The handscroll bears colo- curving downwards frames a five-clawed phons by Daoist scholars and priests active imperial dragon’s enormous two-horned in the early fourteenth century. See Wu Tung, Tales from the Land of Dragons: 1,000 Years also Serpil Bağcı’s forthcoming article in of Chinese Painting, Boston 1997, pp. 90–95, the facsimile edition of H. 2153 and H. 2160, fig. 92; pp. 197–201. The spherical object in “Shāhnāma Folios in the Palace Albums: Celestial Vision could also be interpreted as a Remains from a Jalayirid Manuscript”. Buddhist “Wish-Granting Jewel”, or precious 45 O’Kane, “Siyah Qalam”, p. 14. A Jalayirid attri- pearl (cintāmani), through which one obtains bution was suggested earlier in Klimburg- the wisdom of enlightenment; see Eugene Y. Salter, “A Sufi Theme”, p. 53. Wang, “The Emperor’s New Body”, in Secrets 46 The “black-pen” Shāhnāma image (H. 2153, of the Fallen Pagoda: The Famen Temple and fol. 48v) is illustrated in Zeren Tanındı’s arti- Tang Court Culture, ed. Eugene Y. Wang et al., cle in this volume. Singapore 2014, pp. 64–65.

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Figure 20.4 Celestial Vision, Baghdad or Tabriz, c. 1375–1400. Istanbul, TSMK, H. 2153, fol. 120v.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 551 ground with his face turned towards model into the prevailing Cathayan mode, the heavenly vision. thus turning this hybrid image into a This section of the drawing seems to cosmic site of encounter where Europe have been inspired by images of super- meets Asia. natural encounters on a mountain- top that could have circulated among the Latin Christians of the Levant and The Timurid Tradition Mediated beyond. Prototypes for the probably late by Jalayirid Precedents fourteenth-century Jalayirid ink drawing may have resembled Taddeo Gaddi’s The Timurid workshop album (H. 2152) Annunciation to the Shepherds (1327–30) features three Europeanizing ink draw- fresco in the Baroncelli Chapel (Church ings, all of which are individual figure stud- of Santa Croce, Florence), or Pietro ies. These simple drawings on undamaged Lorenzetti’s Stigmata of St. Francis (c. 1320) off-white paper are rendered in a starkly in the Lower Church of San Francesco linear mode with thick calligraphic strokes in Assisi. These subjects circulated by and minimal modeling. The three some- means of tempera on panel paintings, a what inconspicuous images depict figures later example being Gentile da Fabriano’s in Frankish attire and hairstyle, yet they Stigmata of St. Francis (1419), which is in are stylistically Persianate works attribut- the International Gothic style.48 The visu- able to the Timurid courts of Samarqand ally powerful cleavage at the center of the or Herat and datable to the first half of the Sinicizing landscape in Celestial Vision fifteenth century. The relatively flat figures, accentuates the duality of the miraculous drawn in a clear, concise manner, differ in apparition, consisting of a Latin Christian style from the two subtly modeled Jalayirid seraph on the left and a Chinese lumi- drawings considered above and from other nous pearl on the right. Whether he was Europeanizing images in H. 2153, to which familiar with the iconographic intricacies I shall turn later. of these motifs or not, the inventive artist Only one of the three drawings has has translated his presumably Frankish been published. Drawn in black ink with gray wash and highlights in gold, red, and orange, it depicts a lion-rider taming 48 The relevant paintings by Taddeo Gaddi and Gentile da Fabriano are reproduced in his mount by holding a snake as a whip. Necipoğlu, “The Composition and Compi Another snake is wrapped around his waist lation of Two Saray Albums”, figs. 23–24. as a belt, while a third snake encircles the O’Kane hypothesized that the “two apostle- lion’s neck like a collar. While the iconog- like figures awestruck before a multi- raphy and drawing style of this image are winged angel” were “perhaps derived from a Persianate – resonating with the stories Transfiguration scene;” see his “Siyah Qalam”, of Sufi saints who used snakes to domes- p. 11. Klimburg-Salter compared the dark ticate lions – the rider’s attire appears to tipped wings of angels in Sultan Ahmed Jalayir’s Dīvān (Collected Poems) with those be Frankish.49 The second figure study of the “archangel” in this album drawing, and noted the European influence on them, in 49 Published in Raby, “Samson and Siyah “A Sufi Theme”, p. 53. Qalam”, fig. 479 (H. 2152, fol. 51v), where he

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 552 Necipoğlu represents a man with a disproportion- ately thick neck, wearing a short robe with a laurel wreath on his head and holding a baton, who is walking with a greyhound (fig. 20.5). The boldly calligraphic lines of this drawing, without any modeling or colored wash, are in black and brown ink, with some touches of blue. Its model was probably a medieval classicizing image from the Latin West. The third figure drawing is mounted next to two others, each framed by rulings (fig. 20.6). The figure on the left represents a standing Frankish nobleman with a headband and sword, who is holding a scepter tipped with a rosette and a multi-string object that might be a musical instrument. His hairdo, ermine-lined robe, pointed Gothic boots, and even the slanted positioning of his feet, evoke Figure 20.5 Man Wearing a Laurel Wreath medieval European imagery. Yet the figure and Walking with a Greyhound, in this black ink drawing is almost identi- Samarqand or Herat, first half of the fifteenth century. Istanbul, cal to the two accompanying figure studies TSMK, H. 2152, fol. 96v. of dervishes in its linear style, with shading in gray and gold highlights, as well as in its physiognomy, particularly the eyes. The three contiguous figures have been cut out from originally larger drawings of figures standing in a line. Their crude “chocolate-colored” rulings were added when the Timurid workshop album was reconfigured following the removal of the contents that are currently pasted in the

suggested that the prototype was “perhaps the lion-riding, snake-wielding demon, Tarish, in the Bibliothèque Nationale’s copy Figure 20.6 Standing Frankish Nobleman, of Abu Maashar’s astrological treatise”. For a mounted next to two figure studies late sixteenth-century Safavid painting of a of standing dervishes, Samarqand lion rider holding a snake-whip in one hand or Herat, first half of the fifteenth century. Istanbul, TSMK, H. 2152, and another snake in the other hand, which 45r. forms a collar around his submissive mount’s neck, see p. 160, fig. 486.

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Diez albums. Copies of these dervishes, recall those of musicians represented now five of them led by one holding a beg- in the late thirteenth-century Cantigas gar’s cup, appear in a fifteenth-century de Santa Maria (Songs of Santa Maria), study sheet (Diez A fol. 71, no. 68) featuring attributed to King Alfonso X of Castile and dervish-like standing figures in two parallel Leon, which is illustrated with polychrome horizontal registers. Some of the dervishes paintings in opaque pigments. The Diez represented in the latter sheet are seen in album drawing may have been based on two other study sheets in a Topkapı album a medieval French or possibly Iberian (H. 2153, fols. 32r, 136v).50 source, but the hand of its Persianate art- The Diez albums, in turn, contain three ist is betrayed by such details as facial fea- unpublished Europeanizing black and tures and the manner in which the horse is gray ink drawings on well-preserved, off- drawn, with its tail tied in a knot.51 white paper. Unlike the Timurid workshop The next two ink drawings in the album’s single-figure Frankish studies, Frankish manner belong to groups of con- these are more complex images with inter- secutively ordered Timurid ink drawings active groups of human figures and implicit in the Diez albums.52 Both drawings depict narrative content. Likely removed from amorous Frankish couples on horseback. the Timurid workshop album, the draw- The probably earlier Riding Couple with ings with secular subjects can be identi- an Attendant (c. 1400) is a line drawing fied as Timurid works dateable to the early in black and gray ink, with fine gray lines fifteenth century. One of them depicts picked up by calligraphic brush strokes in an equestrian Frankish king accompa- black (fig. 20.8). Rendered against a blank nied by two standing men playing musical background, it represents a riding aristo- instruments (fig. 20.7). This purely lin- cratic couple followed by a male attendant ear drawing against a blank background on horseback. The woman wears a long has delicate contour lines in gray, with robe with hanging sleeves, a wimple cov- subtle accents in black. The figures sport ering her neck, and a wide-brimmed hat Frankish costume and accoutrements, such as the king’s crown and fleur-de- lis scepter. The standing musicians wear 51 This drawing in the Frankish manner is belted robes with what would seem to be grouped together with two polychrome hanging triangular purses. Their musical paintings, also featuring riders (Diez A fol. 70, instruments decorated with animal heads p. 14, nos. 1, 2; and p. 15), one of them Persianate and the other Cathayan, as if to set 50 The three study sheets are discussed in Zeren up a visual comparison. If so, the sequenc- Tanındı’s article on the repetition of illus- ing of works mounted in the Diez albums trations in the present volume. Roxburgh may in places have retained the consecutive observes that the Timurid workshop album’s order and even composition of folios from “chocolate-colored” rulings, which are miss- which they were removed. Clues provided by ing in materials that migrated from it to the sequencing patterns in the Diez albums were Diez albums, “have had an unfortunate effect noted by Julian Raby and David Roxburgh in on the album, contributing to its careless and their lectures at the 2013 conference in Berlin. shoddy appearance;” see Roxburgh, “Diez 52 The consecutive ink drawings are Diez A and his Eponymous Albums”, pp. 122–123. fol. 71, pp. 64–68; and fol. 72, pp. 1–15.

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Figure 20.7 Equestrian Frankish King with Two Standing Musicians, Samarqand or Herat, first half of the fifteenth century. SBB-PK, Diez A fol. 70, p. 14, no. 2.

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Figure 20.8 Riding Couple with an Attendant, Samarqand or Herat, first half of the fifteenth century. SBB-PK, Diez A fol. 71, p. 64, no. 2.

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Figure 20.9 Riding Couple with a Dog, Samarqand or Herat, first half of the fifteenth century. SBB-PK, Diez A fol. 72, p. 15. bordered by a fringe.53 Her male compan- out a knot, yet the back straps of their har- ion, with hair in a Frankish style, wearing nesses are tied in the Mongol fashion (i.e. a “bowler hat” whose wide brim curves forming an inverted-V attached to a semi- upwards, affectionately wraps his arm circular loop). around the lady’s shoulder. The attendant The second drawing, Riding Couple with with a peaked hat is garbed in a short robe. a Dog (c. 1420s or 1430s), is also executed in The horses have long manes and tails with- black and gray ink, but with heavier lines, and is more elaborately modulated in gray 53 A wimple is a garment around the neck and washes (fig. 20.9). Although an ambitious chin, usually covering the head, which was finished artwork, it contains some awk- particularly fashionable among women in ward details, such as clumsy hands, and the Latin West c. 1300–1400. physiognomies verging on caricature. The

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 557 drawing portrays a courting aristocratic of courting couples hunting or riding couple on horseback, with the man simi- alongside male attendants (figs. 20.10 and larly placing one arm around the woman’s 20.11). Remarkable parallels include the shoulder, as a dog wearing a collar with peaked headdresses, with or without wim- a bell merrily runs along behind them. ples, and the elegant long robes with hang- Unlike the previous drawing, set against an ing sleeves worn by the noble ladies, who empty background, this one features the are adoringly embraced by their chivalric added backdrop of a Sinicizing landscape. companions. The French-style hairdo of The background scenery closely resembles the men and the hooded gowns of atten- a landscape drawing in black ink and gray dants are also comparable. Originating in wash that belongs to the same consecu- classical literary sources, hunting as a met- tive group of Timurid drawings in the Diez aphor for the love-hunt was commonly albums (fol. 71, p. 67).54 deployed as a trope in medieval chivalric The woman in Riding Couple with a Dog romances. With the growing availability of fashionably holds a somewhat deformed ivory in the first half of the fourteenth cen- lapdog. She wears a robe with pleated tury, which declined thereafter, domestic hanging sleeves and a peaked hat with tie objects made of this luxury material – strings fastened by a tassel hanging over such as mirrors, combs, and caskets – were her wimple. Such tiny lapdogs, signify- increasingly decorated with low relief ing fidelity, became a status sign in the secular scenes of courtly pastimes and late medieval period, particularly among episodes from popular romances, express- French royalty and nobility, but to some ing the virtues of courtly love and chivalric extent in Italy as well. The lady’s devotee deeds.55 These profane subjects also found is offering her a pomegranate, a common their way into religious manuscripts, a symbol of fertility in Europe. Once again, relevant example being the tinted ink the horses have long manes and the back drawing Hunters Hawking which forms straps of their harnesses are tied in the a bas-de-page scene in the Queen Mary Mongol fashion, but one of them now Psalter (c. 1310–20), the Latin text of which features the additional detail of a knotted is accompanied by explanations in French. tail. Another element of hybridity that has It depicts a mounted man and a woman been introduced into this drawing in the wearing a wimple, accompanied by a Frankish manner is the man’s exotic cos- male servant on foot holding a lure and tume with a Sinicizing “cloud collar” and a female attendant riding behind the his Mongol hairdo, tied on both sides in a bun with ribbons. 55 Paula Mae Carns, “Cutting a Fine Figure: A surprisingly close parallel to the two Costume on French Gothic Ivories”, in Diez album drawings of riding couples Medieval Clothing and Textiles, ed. Robin is provided by the stock imagery of early Netherton and Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Wood bridge, United Kingdom, and Rochester, NY. fourteenth-century French Gothic ivory 2005, pp. 55–91; Peter Barnet, ed., Images in mirror cases, carved with representations Ivory: Precious Objects of the Gothic Age, exhibition catalogue, Detroit, MI. 1997; Richard 54 For the consecutive groups of Timurid ink Randall, “Medieval Ivories in the Romance drawings, see n. 52 above. Tradition,” Gesta 28 (1989), pp. 30–40.

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couple.56 Comparable manuscripts or mass-produced portable ivory objects could have reached Tabriz or Baghdad under the Mongol Jalayirids, if not earlier under their Ilkhanids predecessors. This brings us back to the Topkapı album H. 2153, which contains an unpublished drawing related to the two drawings of riding couples in the Diez albums (fig. 20.12). This is the astonishing representation of a triumphal procession in black ink, subtly modeled with shading in black and gray against a blank background. Its foreground represents a con- Figure 20.10 Carved ivory mirror case voy of horses tied from the neck by a strap depicting a courting couple hunting to parallel rods that must have been con- with attendants, France (Paris), nected to a ceremonial cart on wheels c. 1330–50. London, Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. 222–1867. on its missing right side. The strip-like format and drawing style of this partially preserved image recalls several black ink drawings on horizontal bands of paper in the Istanbul and Berlin albums, which are generally attributed to the Jalayirid courts of Baghdad and Tabriz.57 The Triumphal Procession drawing is executed on a piece of brownish paper with tattered edges that lack rulings. It features marks of spilled water and a horizontal fold in the middle. Consonant with its foreign subject matter, the figures represented in this drawing have Frankish physiognomies, hairstyles, and attire. The costumes worn by the male and female

Figure 20.11 Carved ivory mirror case 56 For this drawing in the Queen Mary Psalter depicting a courting couple hunting (Royal MS 2 B. vii, fol. 151r), created in with attendants, France (Paris), first London or East Anglia; see the fully digitized half of the fourteenth century. Paris, manuscript on the British Library website. Musée du Louvre, OA 118. http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digitised manuscripts/illuminated-manuscripts/page/ 21/#sthash.iNUtdEu8.dpuf. 57 Duda, “Die Buchmalerei der Ğalā‘iriden;” and Klimburg-Salter, “A Sufi Theme”.

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Figure 20.12 Triumphal Procession, Baghdad or Tabriz, late fourteenth to the first decade of the fifteenth century. Istanbul, TSMK, H. 2153, fol. 92r.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 560 Necipoğlu spectators on horseback, who populate ivy, olive, myrtle, and silver).58 Petrarch’s the background of Triumphal Procession, poem entitled Trionfi (Triumphs, c. 1356– bear a striking resemblance to those of the 60 to 1374) would inspire images in diverse riding couple drawings in the Diez albums. media in a serial genre. Among extant The spectators here include two women, forerunners of this genre are representa- each wearing the same distinctive peaked tions of the Triumph of Fame in two late headdress, with tie strings fastened by a fourteenth-century north Italian manu- tassel hanging over a wimple that covers scripts of Petrarch’s De viris illustribus (On their neck and shoulders. The long robes of Illustrious Men), one of them dated 1379.59 both women have pleated hanging sleeves, The Triumphal Procession drawing in and the one in the front row once again H. 2153 comes closer to the allegorical holds a tiny lap dog. The courting gentle- Petrarchan concept of the triumph of vir- man with a Frankish hairdo on the far left tues than to a classical Roman one. The amorously offers her a round fruit, which late medieval attire of male and female may be a pomegranate, as in one of the spectators in this fragmentary drawing Diez album drawings (fig. 20.9). He wears reinforces the themes of chivalry and a robe with an ermine-lined cape or shawl, courtly love that pervade its iconography. as does the other man depicted in profile The previously discussed drawing of a on the right. The latter holds his horse’s man wearing a laurel wreath and walking reins and wears a robe with pleated hang- with a greyhound in the Timurid working sleeves and a hood over his head. The shop album not only lacks the themes of horse rider at the center is a young man, chivalric courtship and triumph, but is a wearing pointed shoes and a costume with simpler figure study executed in a boldly a fitted upper part and short skirt. His head linear, calligraphic style (fig. 20.5). I have is crowned by a circular laurel wreath in not found a direct Frankish visual source the manner of ancient Roman triumphs. for the Triumphal Procession drawing, Dante (d. 1321), Boccaccio (d. 1375), and whose subject is indirectly related to a Petrarch (d. 1374) were the first authors to number of procession scenes assembled revive the imagery of the classical Roman triumph in order to express medieval allegorical concepts. The earliest examples 58 Margaret Ann Zaho, Imago Triumphalis: of triumphs staged in Italy included the The Function and Significance of Triumphal condottieri Castruccio Castracani’s 1326 Imagery for Italian Renaissance Rulers, New entry to Lucca, and Cola di Rienzo’s 1347 York 2004, pp. 1–69. procession in Rome. Interest in triumphs 59 Triumph of Fame, Paris, Bibl. Nat., MS Lat. peaked in the generation of Petrarch and 6069I, fol. 1r; and MS Lat. 6069F, fol. 1r; his friend Cola di Rienzo, who briefly reju- reproduced in Ellen Callmann, Apollonio di Giovanni, Oxford 1974, p. 12, pls. 18, 20. Sara venated the ancient Roman Republic: the Charney, “Artistic Representations of Petrarch’s former was crowned Poetus Laureatus Triumphus Famae”, in Petrarch’s Triumphs: in 1341 and the latter’s triumphal proces- Allegory and Spectacle, ed. Amilcare A. sion in Rome culminated in his corona- Iannucci and Konrad Eisenbichler, Ottawa, tion with six wreaths (made of laurel, oak, Canada 1990, pp. 223–233.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 561 in H. 2153 and its companion H. 2160.60 ruler of Padua (r. 1350–88), these frescoes The Europeanizing triumph represented were also in grisaille.62 in this ink drawing thematically resonates Some surviving paintings indicate how with the Triumph of Fame in grisaille, dated widely this type of fourteenth-century 1379, forming the frontispiece to Petrarch’s Petrarchan imagery must have circulated. De viris illustribus manuscript mentioned One of them is a fresco in the Campo above. Generally attributed to Altichiero Santo in Pisa (1330s or c. 1350) representing da Zevio (d. 1390) or his workshop, that the Triumph of Death.63 It features aristo- frontispiece depicts illustrious all-male cratic male and female hunters on horse- spectators on horseback, some of them back, wearing wimples and peaked hats, wearing laurel wreaths, who are gazing at while a woman sitting with companions the horse-drawn cart of Fame represented in a nearby garden holds a small lapdog. within a mandorla in the sky above.61 A later portable example is a Triumph of This image has been related to a no lon- Fame painting on a northern Italian cas ger extant grisaille fresco painted around sone or wedding chest (c. 1400), which 1335 by Giotto di Bondone in the palace likewise represents male and female spec- of Azzone Visconti, the ruler of Milan tators on horseback, some of them wear- (r. 1329–39). A follower of Giotto, Altichiero ing peaked hats.64 was involved in painting another lost The pervasiveness of Petrarchan trium- cycle of frescoes, possibly under Petrarch’s phal imagery makes it plausible that a lost supervision, in the Sala Virorum Illustrum variant of this genre may have inspired (Hall of Famous Men) in the Carrara the Triumphal Procession drawing, which Palace in Padua. Executed between 1367 is a less hybrid image than the Timurid and 1379 for Francesco I of Carrara, the 62 See Edith W. Kirsch, Five Illuminated Manu scripts of Giangaleazzo Visconti, University 60 See the procession scenes with a Chinese car- Park, PA. 1991, p. 3, pl. 1; Dunlop, Painted riage on wheels (H. 2153, fol. 73r), a Chinese Palaces, pp. 115–118. palanquin (H. 2160, fol. 67v), a Jalayirid royal 63 I am grateful to Hannah Baader, Senior parade (H. 2153, fol. 153r), and the probably Research Scholar at the Kunsthistorisches late fifteenth-century Sinicizing Aqqoyunlu Institut in Florenz-Max Planck Institut, for Night Procession and Procession with Chinese bringing to my attention the Camposanto Porcelain (H. 2153, fols. 3v–4r; fol. 103v). fresco. It is generally attributed to Buonamico Interestingly, a late fifteenth-century Italian Buffalmacco (active 1315–36), late 1330s; Renaissance Triumph of Fame engraving Luciano Bellosi, Buffalmacco e Il Trionfo della from the Triumphs of Petrarch series, associ- Morte, Milan 2003. Andrea Orcagna (d. 1368) ated with Mehmed II’s court, is mounted in painted a now-lost fresco on the same subject H. 2153, fol. 159r. in the church of Santa Croce, Florence. 61 Triumph of Fame, Paris, Bibl. Nat., MS Lat. 64 The cassone panel, whose present where- 6069I, fol. 1r; see Callmann, Apollonio di abouts is unknown, is illustrated in Callman, Giovanni, pl. 20. Spectators in the second Apollonio di Giovanni, pl. 25. See p. 12 n. 34 for frontispiece from the late fourteenth century differing attributions to Giovanni dal Ponte lack laurel wreaths (MS. Lat. 6069F, fol. 1r), (c. 1420–30) and the circle of Agnolo Gaddi illustrated in pl. 18. (c. 1400 or earlier).

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 562 Necipoğlu drawings of riding couples in the Diez this incomplete manuscript, thought to albums. Based on formal characteris- have been produced in Baghdad or Tabriz tics, this drawing can be attributed to the for Sultan Ahmad himself, must have been Jalayirid courts in Baghdad and Tabriz, created by a leading court artist sometime from the late fourteenth to the first decade between the late fourteenth century and of the fifteenth century. It may not be a the ruler’s death in 1410.67 coincidence that Triumphal Procession What makes the details reproduced is mounted next to an even more ragged here from a double-page Camp Scene in and brightly colored Jalayirid painting the Dīvān relevant for the provenance of of a black raptor in a rocky landscape.65 Triumphal Procession is not their unusu- A Jalayirid rather than Timurid prov- ally refined drawing style (the album enance for Triumphal Procession seems drawing is a less accomplished study with to find further support in the ink draw- awkwardly rendered arms and hands), ings that adorn the wide margins of a cel- but rather the elegant courtly figures with ebrated copy of Sultan Ahmad Jalayir’s (r. similar large round eyeballs, tiny puck- 1382–1410) Dīvān (Collection of Poems) ered lips, and pointed noses (figs. 20.14, in the Freer Gallery of Art. This manu- 20.15, and 20.16). The naturalistic gestures script’s unsurpassed qalam-siyāhī draw- of these figures and the representation ings in black ink, highlighted in gold and of horses are also similar. Moreover, the touches of washes in blue and brown, Frankish costumes worn by spectators exemplify a lyrical taste for naturalism on horseback in Triumphal Procession (fig. 20.13). It has long been recognized remarkably resemble their Persianate that the exquisite figural drawings set Jalayirid versions in the Dīvān drawings. against Sinicizing landscapes are informed Note, for example, the woman with a by a familiarity with Western European wimple and the man with a peaked hat in visual models, which evidently decreased one of the details (fig. 20.16), the tall lady in Timurid Herat.66 The ink drawings of

Gray ed., The Arts of the Book in Central Asia, 65 Framed by complex rulings, the painting of pp. 93–120, on p. 118. See n. 71 below for the this bird of prey has been copied in a newer hypothetical attribution of the Dīvān paint- looking version in the same album (H. 2153, ings to the artist ʿAbd al-Hayy or Junayd. fol. 99r). Massumeh Farhad’s essay in this volume sug- 66 Awareness of Chinese and Western European gests that probably two artists contributed to models in the Dīvān has been acknowl- the Dīvān and that some works can perhaps edged in Martin, Poems of Ahmad Jalair, be attributed to ʿAbd al-Hayy. and Klimburg-Salter, “A Sufi Theme”, p. 53, 67 Massumeh Farhad’s essay in the present vol- without reference to specific sources. ume discusses the controversial dating of the Western European parallels are noted, but Freer Dīvān. She compellingly proposes that direct “influence” is rejected in Duda, “Die the manuscript, which seems to have been a Buchmalerei der Ğalā’iriden”, where China is personal copy of Ahmad Jalayir, was probably declared the primary source of inspiration. produced when this ruler was in control of The Dīvān’s style is described as “Chinoiserie, his territories and not in exile. In the absence clearly reflecting Chinese ink painting”, in of further research, she leans toward a pre- Basil Gray, “The Fourteenth Century”, in Basil fifteenth-century date.

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Figure 20.13 Camp Scene, double-page from the Dīvān of Sultan Ahmad Jalayir, Baghdad or Tabriz, late fourteenth to the first decade of the fifteenth century. Washington, D.C., Freer Gallery of Art, Purchase F1932.34 and F1932.35.

with wimpled headdress standing with her cosmopolitan flavor of Jalayirid fashions male companion next to a tent in another is captured in this double-page drawing detail (fig. 20.15), and the mother sitting and in others in the Dīvān, such as the with her baby in front of a different tent ermine-lined robes with hanging sleeves and wearing a wimpled headdress and worn by a standing aristocratic couple in a robe with hanging sleeves (fig. 20.14). a garden scene. Comparable versions of What is more, the crosshatched straps of these costumes were fashionable among the latter tent are identical to the saddle Frankish nobility in the Latin West and straps of the central horse in Triumphal the Levant.68 The formation of a transna- Procession. Given that crosshatching has tional community of taste was stimulated been identified as one of the diagnostic by extensive networks of trade, diplomacy, features of the Jalayirid court style, this is a telling clue indeed (fig. 20.12). Unlike Triumphal Procession, which 68 For ermine-lined robes and hanging sleeves copies a Frankish model, the Camp Scene in the Dīvān and other related images, see eloquently integrates Europeanizing and Martin, Poems of Ahmad Jalair, pl. II and XIII; Sinicizing details by translating them into Klimburg-Salter, “A Sufi Theme”, p. 45, fig. 2; a distinctive Jalayirid pictorial idiom. The p. 47, fig. 3.

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Figures 20.14, 20.15 and 20.16 Details from Camp Scene, double-page of the Dīvān illustrated above in fig. 20.13 (Two details of F. 1932.34, and one detail of F. 1932.35).

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 565 and conquest.69 The internationalism of Muhammad explains in his album pref- fourteenth-century fashions, which Ibn ace that Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy was trained Khaldun observed in Nasrid al-Andalus in by a student of the previously mentioned the quotation above, is also documented Ilkhanid master, Ahmad Musa (called in a painting of the Chronicon Pictum master Shams al-Din), who flourished in (c. 1373–76) illustrated in the International Baghdad during the reign of the Jalayirid Gothic style for the Angevin ruler of ruler Uvays I (d. 1374). It is pointed out that Hungary, King Louis the Great (d. 1382). this ruler’s successor, Sultan Ahmad Jalayir In this painting, which retrospectively of Baghdad, was trained in depiction by represents the 1285 Mongol invasion of ʿAbd al-Hayy and mastered drawing in Hungary, captive European women wear the “black pen” (qalam-siyāhī) technique. stylish robes in the latest Frankish fashion, Dust Muhammad adds that after ʿAbd with hanging sleeves and wimples over al-Hayy’s death in Samarqand, “all masters their headdresses.70 imitated his works.”71 It is therefore not Close parallels between the Dīvān and unlikely that the two Timurid drawings of Triumphal Procession drawings raise the riding couples in the Diez albums derived possibility that the Diez album’s early from Jalayirid models in the Frankish Timurid representations of courting manner, unless they were copies of early couples in the Frankish manner could fourteenth-century European works made have been mediated by the late Jalayirid after a considerable time lag. pictorial tradition. We know that Sultan The corpus of early fifteenth-century Ahmad Jalayir’s favorite court painter Timurid ink drawings assembled in the and intimate, Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy, was Diez albums is, in fact, believed to have carried off by Timur from Baghdad to evolved from the late Jalayirid tradition. Samarqand (in 1393 or, less likely, 1401), While additional research is required where he spent the rest of his life and to differentiate between Timurid and transmitted Jalayirid artistic practices to Jalayirid drawings mounted in these his pupils. This renowned artist must have albums, it is possible that they may contain brought to Samarqand portfolios contain- more Jalayirid examples than previously ing not only his own works but also his assumed. The two drawings of Frankish collection of pictorial models, which per- riding couples belonging to that corpus haps included Frankish originals. Dust could conceivably be attributed to ʿAbd al-Hayy’s students or followers. Possible 69 Among other things, Italian merchants in Ilkhanid Tabriz traded in furs, including ermine. Additional goods included textiles, 71 Timur deported ʿAbd al-Hayy from Baghdad luxury objects, leather, metals, precious in 1393 according to Duda, who attributes stones, cameos, and pearls; see Paviot, “Les the Dīvān drawings to the artist Junayd; see marchands italiens”, pp. 80–82. “Die Buchmalerei der Ğalā’iriden”, p. 214. 70 The manuscript painting is reproduced The date 1401 is preferred in Klimburg-Salter, in Necipoğlu, “The Composition and “A Sufi Theme”, pp. 69–79, where the Dīvān Compilation of Two Saray Albums”, fig. 28. drawings are ascribed to the artist ʿAbd French high culture had already infiltrated al-Hayy. For Dust Muhammad’s comments, the Hungarian Kingdom before Angevin rule. see Thackston, Album Prefaces, p. 13.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 566 Necipoğlu candidates include artists in the circle of graph signature was not prevalent in the Muhammad b. Mahmudshah al-Khayyam, Timurid workshop in Herat. The use of who seems to have been an esteemed varied inks in his fifteen signatures and in courtier and intimate of the Timurid four attributive inscriptions, simply refer- prince Baysungur Mirza. This conjecture ring to his name (Muḥammad-i Khayyām), is supported by his authentic signature could suggest that they were written at with a distinctive double-knotted flour- different times and in different places. ish that appears next to Baysunghur’s This would be in keeping with artistic signature on a collective calligraphic exer- practices that prevailed in the Herat work- cise sheet. Created during a courtly gath- shop, whose members were assisted by ering of the prince with his entourage, apprentices and sometimes worked in the sheet was mounted in the Timurid different locales, touching up preliminary workshop album as a record preserving sketches during several sessions (perhaps the memory of that occasion (H. 2152, with interruptions) to complete them fol. 31v). I would add that al-Khayyam’s as artworks.73 Such a process of layering identity as an intimate of Baysunghur is documented by unfinished ink drawings finds further support in the wording of his in the Berlin and Istanbul albums, which signatures in that album, some of which provide precious insights into the drawing were removed and remounted in the Diez techniques and working procedures of art- albums. In these signatures, the signatory ists. These albums also record the names of humbly refers to himself in Persian as long forgotten practitioners and amateurs one of the “least of the servants [of the like al-Khayyam, who are omitted from ruler, presumably Baysunghur]” (kamtarīn-i the list of masters in Dust Muhammad’s bandagān Muḥammad b. Maḥmūdshāh album preface and other primary sources. al-Khayyām), echoing the typical wording The traces of their fertile artistic imagi- of several calligraphers’ signatures in the Saray albums.72 73 Conclusions to be drawn from the new The inconsistencies that have recently results of scientific analysis are not straight- been noted in al-Khayyam’s signatures, forward and await further examination of which feature either one or two knot- the evidence. For a different interpretation, see Friederike Weis’s essay in this volume, ted calligraphic flourishes, imply that the in which she discusses the use of vary- modern concept of an invariable auto- ing inks (signifying to her many different hands) and observes that al-Khayyam’s sig- 72 The calligraphic exercise sheet is reproduced nature and attributive inscriptions referring and discussed in Friederike Weis’s essay in to him are not consistent or by the same this volume. Usually the Persian expression hand. Proposing that these were probably kamtarīn-i bandagān is interpreted as the added (forged) in the Ottoman court in the “least of the servants [of some monarch]”. late sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, she It does not generally refer to being a slave doubts that Muhammad al-Khayyam was of God, which is often expressed in Arabic actually a draftsman-calligrapher. I have sug- (aqall-i ʿibād, for instance). For calligraphers gested above that most attributive inscrip- who signed their petitions as kamtarīn-i tions in the three early Topkapı albums likely bandagān in H. 2153 (fols. 98v, 119v), see date from the fifteenth and early sixteenth Thackston, Album Prefaces, p. 47, p. 239. centuries.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 567 nation imprinted in these albums shed the images in H. 2153 (or its companion light on the important role assigned to the H. 2160) bears an attributive inscription visual arts in courtly gatherings (majlis), referring to “Muḥammad-i Khayyām” or where some rulers (like the Jalayirid mon- his knotted signature. These are entirely archs Uvays I and his son Ahmad) were confined to ink drawings mounted in the not only avid connoisseurs but also practi- Timurid workshop album, some of which tioners. Especially since al-Khayyam does have migrated to the Diez albums, imply- not seem to have been known outside the ing that he was unknown to those who inner circles of the Timurid court, it seems compiled the paired Topkapı albums probable that the many signatures and H. 2153 and H. 2160.75 attributive inscriptions referring to him Besides copying works in the Cathayan were added not long after the completion manner, this Timurid courtier may also of the Timurid workshop album in the have harbored an interest in Western early decades of the 1400s. visual sources, if the attributive inscrip- This otherwise unknown courtier’s sig- tion “Muḥammad-i Khayyām” that accom- natures that accompany three ink draw- panies the celebrated Tazza Farnese ings in the Cathayan manner state that (Farnese Cup) drawing can be trusted they were copied from (naql az) the “pen (fig. 20.17). Mounted in the Diez albums, of the painter-decorator, Master ʿAbd the drawing is a close copy of a Hellenistic al-Hayy” (qalam-i ustād ʿAbd al-Ḥayy naqqāsh). Such study exercises (called mashq), based on copying admired mod- H. 2153, fol. 29v. Al-Khayyam’s “copies” (naql) of ʿAbd al-Hayy’s drawings depicting Two els, were a workshop practice shared by Mongol-Chinese Warriors in Combat and of the calligraphers and painter-decorators of a Swimming Duck are in Diez A fol. 71, p. 65; Persianate royal and elite court workshops and Diez A fol. 70, p. 26. His models preserved (kitābkhāna/kutubkhāna/naqqāshkhāna) in H. 2153 (fols. 46v, 87r) were presumably in in the post-Mongol eastern Islamic lands. Herat until the 1450s, after which they trav- That al-Khayyam transcribed the original eled to Turkmen courts with other materi- drawings of ʿAbd al-Hayy in a flattened, als; see Roxburgh, The Persian Album, p. 85, linear style is revealed by two of his mod- pp. 139–40, p. 302. 75 The works of Muhammad al-Khayyam are els preserved in the Topkapı album H. 2153, discussed in Kühnel, “Malernamen in den assuming that those models are not copies Berliner “Saray” Alben”, pp. 66–77; Klimburg- themselves. This album is a rich repository Salter, “A Sufi Theme”, p. 55, pp. 77–78; Lentz of rare Jalayirid works, including ink draw- and Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision, ings inscribed with attributions to ʿAbd p. 346; Basil W. Robinson, L’Orient d’un col al-Hayy, and even the fragmentary paint- lectionneur: miniatures persanes, textiles, ing of a horse’s head ascribed in a note to céramiques, orfévrerie rassemblés par Jean his royal pupil, Sultan Ahmad Jalayir (kār-i Pozzi, Geneva 1992, p. 108; and Roxburgh, The Persian Album, p. 85, pp. 139–140, p. 302. Aḥmad-pādshāh).74 Significantly, none of Robinson speculates that he was probably trained by ʿAbd al-Hayy at the Jalayirid court. 74 Works attributed by inscriptions to Khvaja According to Kühnel, it is unclear whether ʿAbd al-Hayy include H. 2153, fols. 21r; 136v; and this artist was trained by his master in H. 2160, fol. 70r. The horse head is mounted in Samarqand or Herat.

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The Tazza Farnese drawing most probably migrated from the latter album to the Diez albums. Not only does its inventory number fall within the consecutively ordered group of Timurid drawings mentioned above, but its format is echoed in several comparable ink drawings in another Diez album (fol. 73).78 Those drawings similarly comprise roundels within square frames, the two parallel gold rulings of which are lined in black ink with an outer line in lapis lazuli. (The original rulings of the Tazza Farnese drawing can be seen beneath its late eighteenth- Figure 20.17 Drawing after the Tazza Farnese, century, light blue frame.)79 The black ink attributed by an inscription to “Muḥammad-i Khayyām,” Herat or drawing that carefully copies the priceless Samarqand, before 1433. SBB-PK, cameo was conceivably made in Herat or Diez A fol. 72, p. 3, no. 2. Samarqand in the early 1400s, rather than in Aqqoyunlu Tabriz in the 1460s, as some scholars have speculated without sufficient sardonyx cameo from Ptolemaic Egypt.76 Its attributive inscription in naskh script differs from his knotted signatures, but is similar to three attributions referring to was probably applied with varnish contem- him and to other attributions in the Diez poraneously with the drawing or after the and Timurid workshop albums.77 attribution had been written, several decades following the completion of the drawing, before the cameo was brought back to Europe 76 For the Tazza Farnese drawing, see Weis’s in the “1450–60s or, later”. detailed analysis in this volume; Kühnel, 78 Diez A fol. 73: p. 57, no. 1; p. 65, no. 8; p. 65, “Malernamen;” Horst Blanck, “Eine persische no. 9; p. 69, no. 3. “The majority of fifteenth- Pinselzeichnung nach der Tazza Farnese”, century drawings in ms. Diez A. fol. 73 Archäeologischer Anzeiger 79/2 (1964), came from album H. 2152”, according to pp. 307–312; Burchard Brentjes, “The ‘Tazza Roxburgh, “Heinrich Friedrich Von Diez and Farnese’ and its way to Harāt and Naples”, His Eponymous Albums”, p. 120. For Timurid Oriente Moderno, Nuova serie, Anno 15 (76), drawings removed from H. 2152 and pasted Nr. 2, La Civiltà Timuride come fenomeno into Diez A fols. 70–73, see pp. 122–123. internazionale, vol. 1 (1996), pp. 321–324; and 79 One of these drawings depicts a grinning Roxburgh, The Persian Album, pp. 1–3. lion nursing her cub, which resembles sev- 77 Based on the similarity of these attributive eral lion drawings in the Timurid workshop inscriptions, Roxburgh believes that they album that carry Muhammad al-Hayyam’s were written in the early 1400s by the same distinctive signature. See Lion Nursing Her hand; see n. 4 above. In her essay in this vol- Cub, black and gray ink drawing on paper, ume, Weis speculates that the attributive probably Herat, before 1433: Diez A fol. 73, inscription of the Tazza Farnese drawing p. 65, no. 9.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 569 evidence.80 The conjecture that the cameo Whatever the uncertain details of its could have reached Rome via Aqqoyunlu peregrinations, the Tazza Farnese was Tabriz or Ottoman Istanbul is contra- in all likelihood copied at the Timurid dicted by the stronger probability that it court, before it was brought to Italy. It was bought around 1450 from Genoese or has been speculated that the precious Venetian merchants by the King of Naples, cameo was acquired by Timur either as a Alfonso of Aragon (r. 1442–58), although diplomatic gift or as booty in one of his where and when these merchants got campaigns, perhaps plundered from the hold of it is unknown. King Alfonso, who Jalayirid treasury in Baghdad. The cameo brought to an end the Angevin Kingdom of subsequently arrived in Italy, probably Naples, is believed to have either sold the via Italian merchants whose merchan- cameo or given it as a gift to the Venetian dise already included antique cameos in cardinal Ludovico Trevisan. Upon that Ilkhanid times.82 If so, it may have come cardinal’s death in 1465, the antiquarian into the possession of the Genoese or Venetian pope Paul II (1464–71) appears Venetian merchants mentioned above to have acquired his treasures. When that during the turmoil of civil wars that fol- pope too died, it was purchased in 1471 by lowed the Timurid ruler Shahrukh’s death Lorenzo de’ Medici in Rome during the in 1447. Whether a work of “Muhammad-i papal coronation of Sixtus IV, and became Khayyam” or not, the Tazza Farnese draw- one of the most precious artworks of the ing closely reproduces the unfamiliar alle- Medici collection.81 gorical imagery of its Hellenistic prototype with subtly washed fine lines in black ink. 80 The Tazza Farnese drawing is attributed It quite accurately records the antique to Aqqoyunlu Tabriz c. 1460 in J. Michael relief carving except for a few missing Rogers, “ ‘The Gorgeous East’: Trade and details and some hybrid elements that Tribute in the Islamic Empires”, in Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration, ed. Jay A. York 2012; Antonio Giuliano, “Novità sul Levenson, Washington D.C., New Haven and tesoro di Lorenzo il Magnifico”, in Lorenzo London 1991, pp. 69–76, on p. 73. See also J. il Magnifico e il suo mondo, ed. Gian Carlo Michael Rogers, “Ornament Prints, Patterns Garfagnini, Florence 1994, pp. 320–321, no. 43; and Designs East and West”, in Islam and the Luke Syson and Dora Thorton, Objects of Italian Renaissance, ed. Charles Burnett and Virtue: Art in Renaisssance Italy, Los Angeles Anna Contadini, London 1999, pp. 133–166, 2001, p. 85, p. 87. on p. 143 n. 47; and J.M. Rogers, “Mehmed 82 For the appealing speculation that Timur the Conqueror: Between East and West”, in acquired the Tazza Farnese as booty in Bellini and the East, ed. Caroline Campbell Jalayirid Baghdad, see Brentjes, “The ‘Tazza et al., London and New Haven 2005, pp. 80–97, Farnese’ and its way to Harāt and Naples”, on pp. 93–94. For a refutation of Roger’s attri- pp. 321–324. However, according to Brentjes, bution, see Roxburgh, “Persian Drawing”, it was in Baghdad since the Arab conquest of p. 73 n. 55. Ctesiphon in 637, a claim which seems far- 81 On primary sources in Latin and Italian fetched. On the trade in cameos during the that document the somewhat hypothetical Ilkhanid era, see Paviot, “Les marchands ital- peregrinations of the cameo, see Marina iens”, pp. 80–82. In this volume, Weis argues Belozerskaya, Medusa’s Gaze: The Extra that the cameo was never treated as a com- ordinary Journey of the Tazza Farnese, New modity, given that its owners knew its value.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 570 Necipoğlu have crept into it, such as a hero’s Mongol or provenance of the three drawings with hairdo with a bun, a Sinicizing tree with a Frankish riding couples may have been, gnarled trunk on the left, and a typically they are finely attuned to the Persianate Timurid spiky bush on the right.83 aesthetics of Jalayirid and Timurid images To return to the two Diez album draw- of outdoor scenes portraying ardent aris- ings of riding couples in the Frankish man- tocratic couples, one sometimes offering ner, they can be attributed to the circle a round fruit to the other. Such images of Timurid artists who perpetuated the have aptly been characterized as “visual Jalayirid legacy transmitted by Khvaja ʿAbd poetry,” constituting “painted analogues to al-Hayy. The thorny problem of attribution the qasidas and ghazals.”85 Persian lyrical is complicated by the mercurial unpre- poems mounted in the albums are per- dictability of these artists’ styles, which meated with similar themes of courtship changed according to their different mod- and affectionate camaraderie, often over- els. Conventional categories of personal or laid with Sufi overtones. This hints at why regional style become particularly prob- the Frankish iconography of courtly love lematic with images that are based to such and chivalry must have been especially a degree on copying. Another complicat- appealing. ing factor is the roughly contemporaneous development of the late Jalayirid and early Timurid artistic idioms, which may bet- Three Drawings in Brown Ink ter be conceptualized as an international style, not unlike their International Gothic The last three Europeanizing images from counterpart.84 Whatever the authorship H. 2153 that I will consider here constitute an even more puzzling group, only one 83 Identical examples of the spiky bush appear of which has attracted attention. They in drawings from the Timurid workshop are all drawn in brown ink, rather than album reproduced in Roxburgh, The Persian in black, and also differ in that their sub- Album, p. 14, figs. 15 and 16. For a detailed dis- jects were apparently inspired by bibli- cussion of missing or transformed details, see cal imagery. Their iconographies come Weis’s essay in this volume. closer to Latin Christian than to presum- 84 See The International Style: The Arts in Europe Around 1400, Baltimore, MD. 1962, which includes works from France, England, 85 Lentz and Lowry, Timur and the Princely Flanders, the Netherlands, Burgundy, Ger‑ Vision, p. 346. Examples of outdoor scenes many, Bohemia, Austria, Italy, Catalonia, with aristocratic couples and companion and Spain. Here the style is defined as span- groups in the albums include: H. 2153 (fols. 24v, ning three-quarters of a century (1360–1433) 25r, 121v, 47r); and Diez A fol. 72, p. 6, no. 1; with some of its features already intimated fol. 72, p. 11, no. 1; fol. 73, p. 67, no. 2; fol. 73, in the 1320s. The ideological underpinnings p. 69, no. 1. For enthroned royal couples in of the nineteenth-century term “International early fourteenth-century Mongol Ilkhanid Gothic” are discussed by Scott Nethersole in audience scenes, in which the emperor offers his review of a recent exhibition in Florence a pomegranate or round fruit to his queen, entitled “Bagliori dorati. Il gotico internazio- and the queen holds a pomegranate or fruit, nale a Firenze, 1375–1440”, in Renaissance see Diez A fol. 70, p. 21, and p. 23; Diez A Studies 27/5 (2013), pp. 754–764. fol. 71, p. 48; and H. 2153, fol. 53v.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 571 ably more familiar Eastern Christian pro- The unpublished first brown ink draw- totypes, regardless of their drawing style. ing in this group is elaborately modeled, The considerably worn out state of these with some of its parts both drawn and drawings on brownish paper differenti- tinted in brown, black, gray, blue, green, ates them from newer-looking works on red, orange, yellow, and gold (figs. 20.18a off-white paper in the Berlin and Istanbul and 20.18b). Its damaged brownish paper albums, which are attributable to the fif- has a horizontal fold mark in the middle teenth-century Timurid, Aqqoyunlu, and and its tattered edges preserve an old Ottoman courts. Since no comparable frame with rulings in gold, black, and lapis images are found in the Diez and Timurid lazuli. This enigmatic ink and wash draw- workshop albums, a late Jalayirid prov- ing represents a seated androgynous fig- enance may provisionally be proposed ure with Frankish physiognomy and hair, for these drawings. If not produced in a who is wearing a lavishly draped robe and Jalayirid context, they could be ascribed to holding, with both hands (from above the Qaraqoyunlu Turkmens (c. 1388–1468), and below), a celestial sphere that ema- who were initially vassals of the Jalayirids. nates light. I propose that it was inspired Having succeeded their masters by captur- by the image of a seated angel holding an ing Tabriz and Baghdad under Qara Yusuf orb, such as the mid-fourteenth-century (d. 1420), following this ruler’s demise, the panel paintings of Guariento di Arpo Qaraqoyunlu were forced to become vas- (c. 1348–54), who flourished in Padua and sals of Shahrukh. Upon the latter’s death in Venice as a forerunner of the International 1447, they regained independence under Gothic style, and was influenced by Giotto Jahanshah (r. 1438–67), who, from his capi- (fig. 20.19).87 tal Tabriz, reigned over a vast kingdom The halo of Seated Angel Holding an stretching from eastern Anatolia to Herat, Orb has been transformed into an exotic until the dynasty was brought to an end by hair style that frames the angel’s fore- the Aqqoyunlu Turkmens. Production of head. Resembling mountains, the wing- royal manuscripts under the Aqqoyunlu like peaks in the background are faintly dates much later, after their capital was painted with feathers. The angel’s braided transferred from Diyarbakır to Tabriz in hair with central forelock is decorated 1468, gaining momentum around 1478–90 by a lobed half-rosette pendant attached when Shiraz no longer boasted a princely to a diaphanous orange ribbon tied in a atelier.86 fluttering knot at the back. Seated on

86 Barbara Brend’s “A Brownish Study: The Kumral Style in Persian Painting, Its Connec princely rule in Turkmen Shiraz, see the tions and Origins”, Islamic Art 6 (2009), excellent dissertation of Simon Rettig, “La pp. 81–93, traces the use of brown ink in production manuscrite à Chiraz sous les Aq some late fifteenth-century polychrome Qoyyunlu entre 1467 et 1503”, University of paintings in Turkmen Shiraz to their ori- Aix-Marseille, 2011, especially p. 19 n. 24, p. 39, gins in Jalayirid Tabriz, particularly to the pp. 238–244. ink drawings of the Freer Gallery Dīvān of 87 Davide Banzato, Francesca Flores d’Arcais, Sultan Ahmad Jalayir. On manuscript pro- and Anna Maria Spiazzi, eds., Guariento e la duction during Qaraqoyunlu and Aqqoyunlu Padova carrarese, Padua and Venice 2011.

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Figures 20.18a and 20.18b Seated Angel Holding an Orb, with a detail, Baghdad or Tabriz, late fourteenth to early fifteenth century. Istanbul, TSMK, H. 2153, fol. 20v.

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source may have been, the artist of Seated Angel Holding an Orb has interpreted it through the lens of the Cathayan-inspired Persianate visual tradition, which is betrayed by the telltale detail of the sandal’s Chinese bowknot. The second unpublished drawing in the Frankish manner, King Getting Undressed in Front of a Reclining Female Nude, depicts an intriguing couple (fig. 20.20). Delin‑ eated in brown ink with touches of black and gray, it is modeled with a pinkish brown wash. The drawing is rendered on a worn piece of paper, framed by partially preserved, tattered rulings in gold, black, and lapis lazuli. It has pinholes and is punctured in several places, with some of its missing patches repaired. This image represents a standing man in the nude, who impatiently pulls off his robe as he is staring at a nude woman, who is partly covered with a sheet and reclining on a Figure 20.19 Guariento di Arpo, Angel Seated couch. In contrast to her Frankish physi- on a Throne with an Orb in one ognomy and hairdo, the man has typically Hand and Scepter in the Other, Persianate facial features, particularly his c. 1348–54. ALG 176193. eyes. Yet his legs and feet are curiously represented in a Europeanizing pose. His pointed oriental helmet-crown, topped a semi-perspectivally rendered throne by two long feathers, suggests that this with a cushion, the angel rests on a stool hybrid drawing may have been inspired one foot that sports a string-tied sandal by the stories of ancient kings and proph- with a Chinese bowknot. Similarly knotted ets, such as David Lies with Bathsheba. sandals are worn by a man in short trou- If so, its artist possibly interpreted his sers in the Sinicizing painting of a proces- model as a secular scene resonating with sion with Chinese porcelain in the same Persian romance literature.89 While nude album, generally attributed to Aqqoyunlu Tabriz and dated to c. 1470–90, although it is sometimes ascribed more broadly 89 The pinholes were also noted in Roxburgh, to fifteenth-century Iran or Central Asia “Persian Drawing”, p. 75 n. 76, where the drawing is not discussed further. A painting (see Fig. 20.27a).88 Whatever his Frankish representing the subject, “David Lies with Bathsheba”, is included in a French manu- 88 For the broader attribution, see Lentz script from Paris, datable to the 1240s: The and Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision, Morgan Picture Bible, The Morgan Library & pp. 188–189. Museum, New York (MS. M.638, fol. 41v).

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 574 Necipoğlu with two details, Baghdad or Tabriz, late fourteenth to to fourteenth late Tabriz, Baghdad or details, Nude, with two of in Front Female Undressed a Reclining King Getting TSMK , H. 2153, fol. 115v. Istanbul, century. or mid - fifteenth early Figure 20.20

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 575 women are occasionally depicted in some Ming China. With depictions from three literary narrative scenes in the medieval different artistic traditions – Persianate, Persianate painting tradition, male nudes Cathayan, and Frankish – this page were entirely unprecedented. The exag- faces one featuring two vertical scroll gerated, crisp drapery folds and stiff nude fragments. One of these is a decorative bodies of the album drawing resonate with Chinoiserie frieze in black ink, and the their counterparts in late Gothic imagery. other belongs to the same handscroll from The modeling of the rigid bodies recalls Ming China, the remaining parts of which that of nude couples seen in Memmo di are pasted on the reverse side of the bifo- Filippuccio’s frescoes, painted c. 1310–15 in lio, and scattered throughout the album. a vaulted tower chamber at the Palazzo del The Frankish ink drawing, relegated to Podestà in San Gimignano.90 the lowest register of this tripartite page, Clear signs of age and formal characteris noticeably marginalized by the visual istics suggest a date ranging from the late prominence of Cathayan imagery on both fourteenth to the early or mid-fifteenth sides of the bifolio. century for King Getting Undressed, which The third brown ink drawing in the is mounted in one of the few intact bifo- Frankish manner is well known, unlike lios of H. 2153 that have not been disas- the previous two unpublished images sembled. The page on which it is pasted (figs. 20.21a and 20.21b). Its Biblical subject articulates the growing visual autonomy was brilliantly identified by Julian Raby of images in its vertically stacked tripar- as Samson Rending the Lion.91 The exten- tite layout, without any calligraphic speci- sively repaired drawing on creased paper mens (see figs. 20.25a–d). The image in is torn in one corner and several missing the Frankish manner is accompanied by patches have been replaced and reworked. a fifteenth-century Persianate ink draw- It is rendered in brown ink with pinkish ing of two warriors on horseback, and the brown wash and touches of red and gray. fragment of a polychrome painted paper Lacking framing rulings, this is an experi- handscroll from early fifteenth-century mental study sheet with two nearly identical lion riders, who are rending the jaws of their respective mounts. The more accom- 90 I thank Frank Fehrenbach for this observa- plished lion rider on the right is subtly tion. The frescoes in the Room of the Podestà include two lovers in a bathhouse and later modeled in gray and brown washes, unlike in bed; the former is reproduced in Dunlop, its sketchy copy on the left, delineated in Painted Palaces, p. 139, fig. 125. A comparably simpler brown and red lines. Reworked sec- modeled brown ink drawing of a male nude in tions of the rider on the right include the a similar pose and wearing a Western crown hand with which he grips the lion’s lower is featured in Bartolomeo Squarcialupi’s jaw, the upper part of his front leg, and illustrated medical treatise from Padua, dat- the clumsy juncture between his skirt able to the end of the fourteenth century; and the lion’s mane, which have been reproduced and discussed in Dunlop, Painted Palaces, p. 107, fig. 97. I owe this reference to redrawn on replaced patches of paper. Vera-Simone Schulz, research assistant at the Although more than half of his face is Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz-Max Planck Institut. 91 Raby, “Samson and Siyah Qalam”, pp. 160–163.

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Figures 20.21a and 20.21b Samson Rending the Lion, with a detail, Baghdad or Tabriz, late fourteenth to early or mid-fifteenth century. Istanbul, TSMK, H. 2153, fol. 137v.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 577 missing, his Europeanizing physiognomy drawing has been noted by Raby in the and hairstyle are still discernible, as are the same album.94 Colored in tones of brown, two fluttering ribbons tied around his fore- red, gray, and white, this polychrome Lion head, and his pointed headgear topped by Rider, painted with opaque pigments, is two long feathers. part of a study sheet that depicts nomads This drawing provides further evidence belonging to the inscrutable “Siyah Qalam” for the common workshop practice of group (fig. 20.22). That group constitutes a copying models, many examples of which subcategory of the Cathayan manner and exist in H. 2153 and in other Saray albums.92 is mainly confined to two interrelated The drawing style of Samson Rending the Topkapı albums (H. 2153 and H. 2160). Lion exhibits previously unnoted and close Unlike its experimental Frankish counter- parallels to that of King Getting Undressed, part, the similarly repaired study sheet with an observation that is especially true for Lion Rider is framed by partially preserved the lion rider on the right. These two draw- rulings in gold, black, and lapis lazuli that ings are strikingly similar in paper type, announce its status as a prized artwork. In color scheme, modeling technique, and both images, the position of the rider’s fin- the rendering of the drapery folds. Also gers in relation to the lion’s jaws is amaz- notable are the men’s pointed headdresses; ingly alike. But the “Siyah Qalam” Lion these differ in type, but feature two similar Rider differs in several details, including long feathers on top. Moreover, like King the lion’s longer mane and raised shaggy Getting Undressed, the Samson drawing is tail, the positioning of the lion’s front paws mounted on a textless page with a tripar- with respect to the rider’s legs, the distinc- tite layout. Pasted next to a Jalayirid black tive bare feet of the rider, and his hat. More ink drawing of a landscape with a royal significantly, the beast with a shaggy tail is procession overseen by angels, and a frag- a “mythical” Chinese lion, whose eyes and ment of the same Ming-period Chinese hind legs have flame-like motifs. Despite handscroll, this page too promotes compar- differences in detail and style, the two ison between the Persianate, Cathayan, and images are clearly interrelated. Raby has Frankish pictorial traditions (see fig. 20.26). therefore persuasively suggested that the The juxtaposition of the Jalayirid land- “Siyah Qalam” corpus, with its various sub- scape with the Samson drawing hints groups, had a “European connection,” at that those who assembled the page pos- least in this particular example.95 Yet it is sibly saw a connection between these two images.93 94 Raby, “Samson and Siyah Qalam”, pp. 161–162. An astounding painted analogue to the Another ink drawing from the “Siyah Qalam” Europeanizing Samson Rending the Lion group carries more distant echoes of the Samson iconography: it depicts two demons, one of which is riding and rending the jaw of 92 On repeated illustrations in the Diez and a dragon, while the other demon hands him a Topkapı albums, see Zeren Tanındı’s article rope (H. 2153, fol. 37r). in the present volume. 95 A similar Chinese lion is represented in an 93 Another Jalayirid landscape with an attribu- ink drawing mounted in H. 2153, fol. 132r. tive inscription that reads, “work of Ahmad Çağman rejects the European connection of Musa”, is mounted in H. 2153, fol. 85v. the “Siyah Qalam” Lion Rider, proposed by

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Figure 20.22 “Siyah Qalam” Rider, Iran or Central Asia, late fourteenth to early fifteenth century. Istanbul, TSMK, H. 2153, fol. 29v. unclear which image preceded the other, experimental character of Samson Rending or whether they were created around the Lion, one may speculate that it is an the same time and place, the provenance adaptation of the Sinicizing iconogra- of the “Siyah Qalam” corpus itself being phy of the “Siyah Qalam” Lion Rider to a highly debated question.96 Given the a Frankish model by means of creative translation. A German Renaissance engraving from Raby, and regards this image as belonging c. 1475 by the monogrammist F.V.B. has been to the core group of the “Siyah Qalam” corpus connected with Central Asia, which she identified by Raby as the closest model dates from the late fourteenth to the early for the Europeanizing Samson drawing fifteenth century. See Filiz Çağman, “Uzak ve Yakındoğu Arasında bir Başka Geçit: Compilation of Two Saray Albums”. See Mehmed Siyah Kalem”, in Türkçe Konuşanlar: also Adamova, Medieval Persian Painting, Asya’dan Balkanlar’a 2000 Yıllık Sanat ve p. 63, who argues that although the artist Kültür, ed. Doğan Kuban, Istanbul 2007, “Muhammad Siyah Qalam”, whose name pp. 459–473, especially pp. 465–466. appears in numerous attributive inscriptions 96 This corpus has been attributed to the in H. 2153 and H. 2160, is generally believed Jalayirid, Timurid, and Aqqoyunlu courts, have been active in Aqqoyunlu Tabriz under without considering an equally possible the ruler Yaʿqub Beg (1478–90), he may have Qaraqoyunlu provenance; for the latter worked “much earlier and been famous possibility, see my “The Composition and already in the mid-15th century”.

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Rending the Lion, with its depiction of the lion rider’s windblown cape, his posture, and the tail curling between the lion’s hind legs, it differs in other respects, particularly the way in which one of the riders’ legs is grabbed by the lion (the German engraving by contrast shows only one free front leg of the rider). In actuality, none of the known Western prototypes provides an exact parallel to the album drawing Samson Rending the Lion, which is a hybrid image. The capes of the paired lion riders in this Europeanizing drawing, and its Sinicizing “Siyah Qalam” version, find a much closer parallel in an early fifteenth-century Ming period copy Figure 20.23 Samson Rending the Lion, Monogrammist of a Southern Song (1127–1279) painting FVB, German engraving, in the same album. A formerly unnoticed, c. 1475. London, British telling detail in that Chinese painting is an Museum, E, 1.96. almost identical windblown cape worn by a herdsman in the distant horizon, which is tied in the front in a similar bowknot (fig. 20.23), whose iconography can be (fig. 20.24). It therefore seems more likely traced back to eleventh- and twelfth- that an earlier prototype of the German century French Romanesque prototypes. engraving, possibly in a manuscript or Later versions include fourteenth- to portable object, was among the sources of fifteenth-century illustrated manuscripts Samson Rending the Lion, for which I sug- or block-book editions of the Biblia gest a date from the late fourteenth to the Pauperum (Paupers’ Bible).97 Although early or mid-fifteenth century.98 the engraving recalls the drawing Samson

98 Raby admits that, given the popularity of 97 Four Northern European engravings of lion the subject in Western European art since riders, including that of the monogrammist the Romanesque period, “there is no need FVB are illustrated in Raby, “Samson and to assume that the Islamic version was cop- Siyah Qalam”, pp. 160–163, figs. 480–483. For ied after the German engraving of the 1470s;” a unicum fifteenth-century Biblia Pauperum see his “Samson and Siyah Qalam”. O’Kane scroll manuscript in the Topkapı Palace speculates that an earlier example may Library, compared to other examples dating have arrived in Ilkhanid or Jalayirid Iran; see from 1300 to the early sixteenth century, see O’Kane, “Siyah Qalam”, p. 10. Images in mul- Funda Berksoy, “Topkapı Sarayı’ndaki Biblia tiple media related to the Samson and the Pauperum Rulosu: Rulonun Önemi, Türü Lion theme are illustrated in a study on the İçindeki Yeri ve Fra Angelico’nun Lex Amoris Capella Palatina in Palermo, where the two Panosu ile Olan Benzerliği”, Journal of Turkish album drawings in H. 2153 (fols. 137v, 29v) are Studies, Şinasi Tekin Hatıra Sayısı III, 32/1 attributed to “eastern Iran or Central Asia, (2008), pp. 89–105. 14th–15th century”: Ernst J. Grube and Jeremy

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practice of copying models was comple- mented by a thus far underestimated crossbreeding of the Persianate, Cathayan, and Frankish styles of depiction. We have seen that the page layouts of several folios in H. 2153 deliberately draw attention to this phenomenon by juxtaposing images Figure 20.24 Detail from Peasants with Water from these three artistic traditions, thereby Buffaloes Returning Home through inviting a visual comparison between them a Rainstorm, early fifteenth century, (fig. 20.25a–d, and 20.26). I have argued probably a Ming-period copy of a elsewhere that this implicit comparative Southern Song original. Istanbul, TSMK, H. 2153, fol. 103r. agenda is a design strategy pervading that album as a whole, with its unusually extensive corpus of imagery selectively drawing upon Frankish and Cathayan models.99 Epilogue: “Three Eyes” of the World Mid-fourteenth- to mid-fifteenth-century Europeanizing images analyzed in the The Diez and Topkapı albums uncover present essay reveal that artists employed the imbrication of the purportedly “pure” in Persianate court workshops simulta- Persianate artistic tradition with foreign idi- neously derived inspiration from both of oms of naturalistic depiction. The hybrid‑ these foreign visual cultures, character- ity of some images in these albums dem- ized by a differently expressed yet shared onstrates that the well-known workshop emphasis on naturalism. In this connection, it is worth fully quot- Johns, The Painted Ceilings of the Capella ing the previously mentioned passage from Palatina, Genoa and New York 2005, pp. 204– Dust Muhammad’s preface to the Bahram 207. Another early example in fol. 43v of the Mirza album, where he attributes the abovementioned Queen Mary Psalter (c. 1310– invention of the Persianate painting tradi- 20) is a tinted ink drawing of Samson rend- tion practiced in the mid-sixteenth-century ing the lion, where the rider wearing a short Safavid context to the Mongol Ilkhanid art- robe without a cape has a similar pose ist, Master Ahmad Musa. It was he who, astride a lion whose tail is curling between its hind legs. See n. 56 above for this digi- about two hundred years ago, revived the tized manuscript. For a naked lion rider in art of figural painting with a fresh new nat- a comparable pose and a windblown cape, uralism, rivaling that of the Frankish and identified as Hercules, see Lieve Watteeuw Cathayan masters of depiction: and Jan Van der Stock, eds., The Anjou Bible: A Royal Manuscript Revealed, Naples 1340, Paris, The custom of portraiture/figural Leuven and Walpole, MA. 2010, p. 138, fig. ix.I, painting (ṣūrat-sāzī) flourished in fol. 229r. I thank Vera-Simone Schulz for this the lands of Cathay and the Franks reference. The Chinese painting is published and dated in Toh Sugimura, The Encounter until sharp-penned Mercury scrivened of Persia with China: Research into Cultural Contacts Based on Fifteenth Century Persian 99 Necipoğlu, “The Composition and Compi Pictorial Materials, Osaka 1986, xvii, p. 215. lation of Two Saray Albums”.

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Figures 20.25a–d Front and reverse sides of the bifolio mounted with King Getting Undressed in Front of a Reclining Female Nude. Istanbul, TSMK, H. 2153, fols. 114r–115v (top), and fols. 114v–115r (bottom).

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the rescript of rule in the name Vasari’s and Dust Muhammad’s strik- of [the Ilkhanid] Sultan Abu Saʿid ingly similar “inventions of tradition” Khudaybanda. Master Ahmad Musa, were retrospective assessments that built who was his own father’s pupil, lifted upon oral traditions embedded in the col- the veil from the face of depiction lective memories of artists and patrons. (taṣvīr), and the [style of] depiction Like Vasari, whose teleological art histori- that is now current was invented by cal narrative privileged the contribution him.100 of Tuscany to the birth of a new kind of painting that heralded the Renaissance, A subtext of this preface and the Safavid Dust Muhammad’s account foregrounds literature on the visual arts in general is the role of Timurid Herat in transmit- that artists who succeeded Master Ahmad ting the mode of depiction invented by Musa in the eastern Islamic lands engen- Master Ahmad Musa, via Ilkhanid and dered a superior realism in Persianate Jalayirid intermediaries, to contemporary pictorial arts by uniting outer and inner Safavid artists.103 Originating himself from vision.101 Dust Muhammad’s passage the environs of Herat, Dust Muhammad quoted above (1544–45) precedes that served Safavid royal patrons who had gov- of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550), where it erned that provincial capital as princes, is similarly declared that Giotto (d. 1337) namely Shah Tahmasp (in 1516–22), and “became so good an imitator of nature that his brother Bahram Mirza (in 1529–33). he banished completely that rude Greek Both brothers were trained there in paint- [Byzantine] manner and revived the ing by the last practitioners of the late modern and good art of painting, intro- Timurid workshop, some of whose mem- ducing the portraying well from nature of bers, including the famous painter Bihzad, living people, which had not been used Tahmasp transferred to his own court for more than two hundred years.” Vasari’s workshop in the Safavid capital Tabriz account ends with the Latin text of Giotto’s upon his accession in 1524. Highlighting epitaph in Florence Cathedral that was the legacy of Herat in Khurasan, Dust commissioned many years later in 1489–90 Muhammad’s linear storyline marginalized by Lorenzo de’ Medici in the artist’s own other artistic centers no longer ruled by voice: “I am the one who revived the dead the Safavids, such as Baghdad (in Ottoman art of painting.”102 Iraq), and Samarqand (in Uzbek Central Asia). It also largely left out the names of Qaraqoyunlu and Aqqoyunlu Turkmen 100 Thackston, Album Prefaces, p. 12. painter-decorators who once practiced 101 See my discussion of Dust Muhammad’s preface, along with other sixteenth-century Safavid written sources on the arts, in “The 103 On the pro-Herati perspective of Dust Scrutinizing Gaze in the Aesthetics of Islamic Muhammad that privileges the Timurid over Visual Cultures”. the Turkmen artistic heritage of the Safavids, 102 Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent see David J. Roxburgh, Prefacing the Image: Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, translated The Writing of Art History in Sixteenth- by Gaston du C. de Vere, 10 vols., London Century Iran, Leiden 2001, pp. 144–146; and 1912–15, pp. 69–94. http://www.casasantapia Rettig, “La production manuscrite à Chiraz .com/art/giorgiovasari/lives/giotto.htm. sous les Aq Qoyyunlu entre 1467 et 1503”, p. 171.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 583 in the now Safavid centers of Tabriz and The Europeanizing works examined Shiraz in Iran, not to mention the contem- here document the development of draw- porary practitioners of Persianate court ing in the “black pen” technique as an workshops in the Ottoman, Uzbek, and autonomous artistic genre, going beyond Mughal domains. preparatory sketches and mere study exer- This teleological Herati viewpoint fore- cises. This ink and wash technique that grounding Safavid Iran has left its indelible later came to be known as “half pen” (nīm imprint on the modern historiography of qalam) was especially prevalent in murals, what is known as “Persian Painting,” not judging by the paintings of palatial inte- unlike the impact of Vasari’s narrative riors in manuscripts. One early example on the era conventionally labeled “the mounted in the Bahram Mirza album is a Renaissance.” The Saray albums in Berlin painting ascribed by Dust Muhammad’s and Istanbul “unveil” a wider art historical caption to the celebrated Jalayirid artist perspective with their exceptional con- Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy (c. 1390), whose royal tents, some of them attributed by inscrip- pupil Sultan Ahmad Jalayir specialized in tions to artists and calligraphers excluded the “black pen” (qalam-siyāhī) technique. from Dust Muhammad’s canon, though It depicts a palace interior with a figural many coincide with named masters cited mural painted in grisaille, of a standing in his preface and other sources. These woman holding her baby against the back- albums enable us to rethink the interna- drop of a Sinicizing landscape.105 tionalism of Persianate arts cultivated in If my dating and contextualization of diverse post-Mongol courts in the eastern the Frankish manner album drawings is Islamic lands, without of course denying correct, their creation overlapped with the distinctiveness of regional, dynastic, the development of International Gothic and personal idioms. The unusual con- (c. 1360–1437), a pan-European style extend‑ tents of the albums testify to a relatively ing over a wide area. It may not be a coin- short-lived experimentation with imagery cidence, then, that both Giotto (1226–1337) in “exotic” manners and large formats (full- and Ahmad Musa (c. 1316–35) flourished at or double-page, and handscrolls), some of them intended for textiles, luxury objects, and mural paintings. A reevaluation of ists, calligraphers, measurements, and types of composite rulings that frame images and this extraordinary corpus will have to be calligraphies. accompanied in the future by comparative 105 The painting, The Poet’s Dream, was removed codicology, chemical analysis of paper and from a celebrated Jalayirid manuscript, the pigment or ink types, and by determining Three Masnavīs of Khvaju Kirmani in the the measurements of individual works, so British Library (Add 18113); it is reproduced as to establish connections more system- in Brend, Muhammad Juki’s Shahnama, atically between the Diez and Topkapı p. 16, pl. 9. See also Lentz, “Dynastic Imagery albums, as well as related specimens in in Early Timurid Wall Painting”. Although the manuscript’s colophon gives the date 796 other collections.104 (1396), Brend and Adamova assign an earlier one (c. 1390) to its illustrations, and accept 104 A preliminary step in this direction is the Dust Muhammad’s attribution of The Poet’s forthcoming facsimile edition of H. 2153 and Dream to Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy. See Adamova, 2160, with its comprehensive index of art- Medieval Persian Painting, pp. 37–40.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 584 Necipoğlu a time when visual cultures in the West library in Shiraz and from thence to Herat. and East alike were being invigorated by Several artists too traveled from Sultan a fusion of Eurasian artistic traditions in Ahmad’s court workshop to Shiraz, while diverse media, prompted by the wider cir- others remained in Tabriz, where they culation of luxury goods and artists dur- were “discovered” in 1420 by Baysunghur. ing the Pax Mongolica (c. 1250–1350). The The prince brought back to Herat some emergence of the International Gothic artists from that city, where the head of style, which has generally been framed his court workshop originated, the cal- within a Eurocentric paradigm, may there- ligrapher Kamal al-Din Jaʿfar Tabrizi.107 fore be reconceptualized as partaking in a After Baysunghur’s departure, rule of broader Eurasian framework.106 Likewise, Tabriz reverted to the Qaraqoyunlu, who the presumption that contemporaneous accepted vassalage to Shahrukh (d. 1447). late medieval artists in Persianate court We learn from Dust Muhammad’s workshops almost exclusively directed album preface that Baysunghur even com- their gaze toward China has to be modi- missioned a book “after the pleasing man- fied, judging by the Frankish manner ink ner of Sultan Ahmad Jalayir of Baghdad’s drawings of the Saray albums that have miscellany [ jung]” in exactly the “same not previously been scrutinized as a group. format and layout and with the same The resonant aesthetics of international scenes depicted.” Since this Timurid prince styles cultivated in late medieval Islamic died in 1433 before its completion, his son and Christian courts would be replaced by ʿAla‌ʾuddawla had it finished in the Herat less fluid artistic boundaries imposed workshop by employing the same team by the classicizing antiquarianism of the and sending someone to Tabriz to bring Renaissance and the invention of single- Khvaja Ghiyathuddin Pir-Ahmad Zarkub, point perspective. who “ennobled the leaves of painting in The turn of the fourteenth-fifteenth Herat with the subtlety of his brush and centuries was a time when artistic “influ- touched up some places in the scenes of ence” constituted a marker of authority the miscellany and painted with captivat- and cosmopolitanism. Hence, books cre- ing colors and finished it off with blood, ated for the Timurid prince Baysunghur Mirza in the Herat workshop were largely based on those of Sultan Ahmad Jalayir. The prince may have acquired some of 107 See Norah M. Titley, Persian Miniature those books in Tabriz, where he was sent Painting and Its Influence on the Arts of Turkey in 1420 by his reigning father, Shahrukh, and India: The British Library Collections, to seize the city upon the death of its Austin, 1984, pp. 31–32; O.F. Akimushkin, Qaraqoyunlu Turkmen ruler, Qara Yusuf. It “The Library-Workshop (kitābkhāna) of has been proposed that manuscripts from Bāysunghur-Mīrzā in Herat”, Manuscripta Orientalia 3/1 (1997), pp. 14–24; Roxburgh, Sultan Ahmad’s library were taken to the The Persian Album, pp. 39–41. On the manu- Timurid prince Iskandar-Sultan’s (d. 1414) script production of the Qaraqoyunlu and Aqqoyunlu Turkmen dynasties in Shiraz, see 106 On the International Gothic Style (or Rettig, “La production manuscrite à Chiraz International Style), see n. 84 above. sous les Aq Qoyyunlu entre 1467 et 1503”.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 585 sweat and tears.”108 During the turmoil of all those brought there from other following Shahrukh’s death in 1447, the foreign parts. They say that those of rival Timurid prince Ulughbeg (d. 1449) Cathay are the most skillful people in invaded Herat and carried leading mem- the world, and the saying is that they bers of its workshop to his own capital, have two eyes, that the Muslims are Samarqand, “where he showed them great blind, and the Franks have one eye. favor, made them his attendants,” and Thus they [Cathayans] possess an commissioned them to make new works.109 advantage in the goods they make This state of affairs confirms the depen- over all the nations of the world.110 dence of Timurid patronage not only on the skills of Tabrizi, Shirazi, and Baghdadi Versions of this saying, which originated artists steeped in the Jalayirid legacy, but in the twelfth century, circulated widely also on the circulation of manuscripts and in the post-Mongol Timurid, Turkmen painter-decorators, through which work- and Safavid courts. Its source has been shop practices and lore became transmit- traced back to the Chinese subjects of the ted across a wide area extending from Mongols, who proudly claimed that only Anatolia to Central Asia and India. they themselves saw with two eyes, and Despite the glance cast at the Western the Fu-Lang (of the Far West) saw with European tradition by artists employed one eye, while everybody else was blind.111 in late medieval court workshops of the eastern Islamic lands, the major catalyst behind the new expressive naturalism 110 Ruy Gonzáles de Clavijo, Embajada a Tamorlán, ed. Francisco López Estrada, of Persianate pictorial arts was Yuan and Madrid, 1999, p. 313; Ruy Gonzáles de Clavijo, early Ming China. The priority of status Embassy to Tamerlane, 1403–1406, trans. Guy assigned to the Cathayan manner on the Le Strange, London 1928, p. 289. I have slightly pages of H. 2153 that are reproduced here modified Le Strange’s translation by compar- (figs. 20.25a–d and 20.26), and in the Saray ing it with the Spanish version. Le Strange albums in general, accords well with a say- interpreted the ambiguous “they” in the last ing the Castilian ambassador to Timur, sentence as referring to both the Cathayans Ruy Gonzáles de Clavijo, attributed to and Franks, but the passage is embedded in a broader discussion on the undisputed pres- the Timurids when he visited Samarqand tige of Cathayan goods. in 1404: 111 For the sources of this old saying in China and its repetition by Hayton, Clavijo, Zakariya The goods that are imported to this al-Qazvini, and Ibn Fadl-Allah al-ʿUmari, see city [Samarqand] from Cathay indeed Jackson, The Mongols and the West, p. 330, are of the richest and most precious p. 350 n. 2. According to Jackson, it first appeared in a twelfth-century source, which suggests that it originally referred, not to the 108 Thackston, Album Prefaces, pp. 13–14. Franks, but to the Byzantines. Overlooked Baysunghur also commissioned the replica of by Jackson, is an earlier version of this say- a Jalayirid Kalīla va Dimna manuscript for his ing recorded by Ahmad b. Muhammad library: See O’Kane, Early Persian Painting, al-Thaʿalibi (d. 1038), according to which p. 214. the Chinese themselves say, “Except for 109 Thackston, Album Prefaces, pp. 13–14. us, the people of the world are all blind –

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Figure 20.26 Folio with Samson Rending the Lion. Istanbul, TSMK, H. 2153, fol. 137v.

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A variant of the same saying that deco- (figs. 20.27a and 20.27b).113 It juxtaposes rously bypasses the humiliating blindness two full-page Persianate paintings com- of the Muslims was recorded by Giosafat monly attributed to the Aqqoyunlu court Barbaro, the Venetian envoy to Tabriz in workshop in Tabriz (c. 1470–90). One of the 1474. The ambassador quotes the follow- paintings represents a Sinicizing proces- ing remark by the Aqqoyunlu Turkmen sion with Chinese porcelain, and the other ruler Uzun Hasan (r. 1453–78): “The world is an allegorical depiction of a Christian has three eyes; the Cathayans have two of monastery incorporating Europeanizing them and the Franks one.” Barbaro recalls features.114 The previously unnoted juxta- that while he was in Tana he had heard position of these two well-known images from an ambassador who returned from on the same bifolio is a revelation that Cathay in 1436 that their ruler said in an speaks to the selective integration of audience, “We Cathayans have two eyes Cathayan and Frankish elements into the and you Franks one, whereas you (turning mainstream metropolitan tradition of towards the Tatars [i.e., the Mongols] who Persianate painting, a synthesis that had were with him) have never a one.”112 already started in the late Jalayirid period. It is precisely this hierarchical ranking Nonetheless, it is worth observing that that guides the proportion of Cathayan the impact of the Frankish manner on to Frankish images in the Saray albums. Aqqoyunlu narrative manuscript paint- The internalization of these two foreign ing remained noticeably muted, partly traditions of naturalistic depiction by the due to the somewhat closed system of late fifteenth century can be observed in a bifolio of H. 2153 that I have reconstructed 113 For this and other reconstructed bifolios, see Necipoğlu, “The Composition and Compi lation of Two Saray Albums”. 114 For the somewhat speculative hypothesis that unless one takes into account the people the Monastery painting, with its depiction of Babylon, who are merely one-eyed:” of frescoes that incorporate some elements cited from the Laṭāʾif al-maʿārif (Book of from “Western European art”, was created Curious and Entertaining Information) in for Uzun Hasan’s Orthodox Christian wife, Roxburgh, The Persian Album, p. 159. I sug- Theodora Komnene, between 1469 and 1474; gest that the “people of Babylon” may refer to see Assadullah Souren Melikian-Chirvani, the Sasanian lands ruled at that time by the “The Iranian Painter, the Metaphorical ʿAbbasids. For an ancient tradition concern- Hermitage and the Christian Princess”, ing the “two eyes” of the world, possessed by Bulletin of the Asia Institute, New Series 16 the Sasanians and Romans, see Matthew P. (2002), pp. 37–52, especially pp. 42–44, Canepa, The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and pp. 47–48. Melikian-Chirvani believes that Ritual Kingship between Rome and Sasanian “illuminated Gospels and Books of Hours Iran, Berkeley 2009. would have been brought back from Europe 112 See “Travels of Giosafat Barbaro”, in Travels by the mission led by a Franciscan monk, to Tana and Persia, by Josafa Barbaro and Lodovico da Bologna, which left Tabriz in Ambrogio Contarini, trans. William Thomas 1460 and traveled to France, the Lowlands, and S.A. Roy, ed. Lord Stanley of Alderley, and Burgundy before returning to the New York 1964, p. 58. Āqquyūnlū court in 1461”.

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Figures 20.27a and 20.27b Bifolio with two full-page polychrome paintings c. 1470–90: (a) Procession with Chinese Porcelain; (b) Monastery. Istanbul, H. 2153, fols. 130r–131v.

conventions governing that mode of may yield more detailed information on image-making intended to illustrate texts. the types of European works available An unexpected aspect of my reframing to these artists, they seem to have stayed of the Saray albums is the new perspec- fairly au courant with the latest trends tives they offer on the Jalayirid picto- abroad, judging by the comparisons with rial tradition. The polychrome Monastery French and Italian exemplars I have pro- painting, attributable to Aqqoyunlu Tabriz, posed. Early imitative practices, which represents a later stage of restrained culminated in a late fifteenth century pro- assimilation, heralded by former engage- cess of synthetic integration and codifica- ments with visual models from the Latin tion, demonstrate that subsequent artistic West, on which this essay has focused. exchanges with the West were rooted in up The album drawings that have been ana- till now unnoticed precedents. lyzed here document for the first time Yet another version of the saying on the copying and imaginative transforma- the world’s “three eyes” circulated at the tion of Frankish prototypes, particularly Safavid court in Tabriz during Shah by court artists of the Jalayirids and, to a Tahmasp’s reign in 1540, shortly before the lesser degree, their early Timurid succes- compilation of the Bahram Mirza album sors. While it is hoped that future research for his brother in 1544–45. The Venetian

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 589 envoy Michele Membré was told during In the course of Shah ʿAbbas I’s reign an audience with Shah Tahmasp and his (1587–1629), the increased status of the brother Bahram Mirza the following vari- Frankish manner would eclipse that of ant of that adage: “Well do they say that all its Cathayan counterpart.118 That change nations have one eye and the Franks two.”115 of attitude was foreshadowed by the late I would argue that this conspicuous trans- fifteenth-century Ottoman works added formation of the old saying hints at the to H. 2153, when this album came close rising prestige of the Frankish visual tradi- to its present configuration in the court tion. Yet the likes of Europeanizing images workshop of Sultan Selim I. Besides the assembled in former albums hardly found Aqqoyunlu Monastery painting, its latest an echo in the sixteenth-century “clas- Europeanizing images are several Ottoman sical” Safavid tradition of albums and painted portraits attributed to Sultan manuscript paintings. The modification Mehmed II’s (d. 1481) court artists.119 Those of the saying can therefore be read as a portraits are mostly study exercises that conceit that now entitled Persianate art- now respond to Italian Renaissance models, ists to one eye, rather than none, an eye instead of Frankish International Gothic that united the powers of outer and inner imagery. They are all polychrome paint- vision.116 The Bahram Mirza album lays ings, unlike the earlier Europeanizing ink claim to all three eyes with its combina- and wash drawings examined here. Rather tion of Persianate, Cathayan, and Frankish than depict exotic Frankish foreigners and images (though only two), thus assuming an omnivoyant, all-seeing supremacy.117 Roxburgh, The Persian Album, pp. 301–302; the two Frankish images are reproduced in 115 Michele Membré, Mission to the Lord Sophy figs. 167 and 168 on p. 302. of Persia (1539–1542), translated with notes by 118 Sheila R. Canby, “Farangi Saz: The Impact of A.H. Morton, Warminster, United Kingdom Europe on Safavid Painting”, in Silk & Stone: 1999, p. 22. It was the Qurchibashi who said: The Art of Asia, the 3rd Hali Annual, ed. Jill “Ben diceno che tutte le generazion hano Tilden, London 1996, pp. 46–59; and Amy uno occhio, e li Franchi ne hano doi”. See S. Landau, “Muhammad Zaman, Master of Michele Membré, Relazione di Persia (1542), Farangī-Sāzī”. Two late sixteenth-century ed. Francesco Castro, Naples 1969, p. 25. Europeanizing ink drawings by Aqa Riza 116 This is implied by Dust Muhammad’s pref- and Sadiqi Beg are published in Stuart Cary ace and other Safavid album prefaces from Welch and Kimberly Masteller, From Mind, the second half of the sixteenth century; see Heart, and Hand: Persian, Turkish, and Necipoğlu, “Early Modern Floral: The Agency Indian Drawings from the Stuart Cary Welch of Ornament in Ottoman and Safavid Visual Collection, New Haven, London, Cambridge, Cultures”, and “The Scrutinizing Gaze in the MA. 2004, pp. 56–59 and pp. 68–71. These are Aesthetics of Islamic Visual Cultures”. among the earliest extant Safavid images in 117 An ambiguity toward the Frankish manner a European idiom; they became more preva- is sensed in Dust Muhammad’s preface and lent from the second half of the seventeenth his inclusion of only two Frankish images century onwards. in the Bahram Mirza album. For the obser- 119 On these portraits, see Raby, “Mehmed II vation that this album features no Iranian Fatih and the Fatih Album”, pp. 42–49; and works responding to European images, unlike Necipoğlu, “Visual Cosmopolitanism and the many responses to Chinese imagery, see Creative Translation”, pp. 37–45.

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University 590 Necipoğlu exoticising foreign narrative subjects, the reverse side, two symmetrically mounted Ottoman portraits eagerly embrace the Florentine engravings with matching col- latest Western techniques of naturalistic ors occupy center stage, their calligraphic depiction for self-representation. character reverberating with the linear aes- To give an example, one of the bifolios thetic of adjoining calligraphies in black I have reconstructed features symmetrical, ink. Like most calligraphy specimens that U-shaped page layouts organized around accompany the album’s Italian engrav- two centrally placed, famous bust portraits ings, the poems referring to Mehmed II’s of Mehmed II in profile that face each coupled bust portraits were signed by two other: the sultan’s engraved Florentine celebrated calligraphers, ʿAbd al-Rahim portrait labeled El Gran Turco, and his al-Khvarazmi al-Yaʿqubi and his brother painted bust portrait attributed to the ʿAbd al-Karim. These brothers, who worked Ottoman court painter Sinan Beg. These for the Qaraqoyunlu prince Pir Budaq meaningfully juxtaposed portraits are (d. 1466) and the Aqqoyunlu Sultan Khalil accompanied by two calligraphies quot- (d. 1478), continued to flourish in Tabriz, ing Persian poems that pointedly eulogize primarily under the last Aqqoyunlu rulers, the beloved’s face.120 The unified mise- Yaʿqub Beg (r. 1478–90) and Rustam Beg en-page of the bifolio invites comparison (r. 1492–97). between the European and Europeanizing My reconstruction of the bifolio featur- manners of image-making promoted in ing Mehmed II’s portraits shows that the Mehmed II’s court, which his grandson album’s Italian engravings were almost Selim I sought to revive.121 On the bifolio’s certainly mounted at the Ottoman court. After all, it is highly unlikely that Yaʿqub 120 This bifolio (H. 2153, fols. 144r, 145v) is recon- Beg would have commemorated his structed and discussed together with the father Uzun Hasan’s (d. 1478) archenemy, accompanying poems in Necipoğlu, “The Mehmed II, by displaying this sultan’s Composition and Compilation of Two paired portraits in such blatant fashion. Saray Albums”, fig. 1a–b. The two portraits Assembled in all likelihood around 1514, of Mehmed II are also reproduced and ana- the album H. 2153 expands the former lyzed in Necipoğlu, “Visual Cosmopolitanism horizons of the Western gaze by assign- and Creative Translation”, p. 18, fig. 7a–b; and ing a prominent place to early Italian p. 36, fig. 19. At the time I wrote that article, I had no idea that the portraits were paired in Renaissance engravings from Florence and a symmetrically composed bifolio. The visual Ferrara (c. 1460–80), collected in the court contexts of those portraits and other works in of Selim I’s grandfather. The grandson’s the album H. 2153 had not been noted before own multicultural tastes explain his inter- because publications, including my own, est in preserving the truly unique works were preoccupied with different questions. in foreign visual idioms collected in this 121 On Selim I’s emulation of his grandfather, unusual album. Admiringly exhibited on see n. 8 above. The letter a Florentine banker sent in 1519 to Michelangelo urged him to come to Selim I’s court, or to send another Bayezid II, and had recently bought the first rate artist, shortly before the sultan’s statue of a reclining nude (see Necipoğlu, death in 1520. The letter explained that Selim “Visual Cosmopolitanism and Creative I was fond of figural arts, unlike his late father Translation”, p. 48).

Gülru Necipolu - 9789004323483 Downloaded from Brill.com03/06/2019 09:42:32PM via Harvard University Persianate Images Between Europe and China 591 symmetrically composed bifolios, next to With its suggestive page layouts, H. 2153 equally prominent calligraphy specimens visually prefigures the comparison Dust signed by the innovative Khvarazmi broth- Muhammad’s preface sets up in the ers, the rare Italian engravings echo the Bahram Mirza album (1544–45) between delicate linear pen strokes of accompany- Persianate art and works from the Frankish ing calligraphies in nastaʿlīq script.122 and Cathayan traditions. The remarkable intersections of these two albums (H. 2153 122 For a discussion of the source of the Italian and H. 2154), and the earlier Timurid work- engravings and my reconstructions of the shop album (H. 2152), which in turn was a bifolios on which they are mounted, along- major source for the Diez albums, affirm side calligraphies by the two Khvarezmi their complementarity as an unmatched brothers, see Necipoğlu, “The Composition visual archive for the artistic imaginar- and Compilation of Two Saray Albums”, ies and creative practices of post-Mongol figs. 1a–b, 1c–d, 3a–b, 4a–b, 5a–b, 5c–d. The distinctive type of nastaʿlīq script associated court workshops from the fourteenth with these two brothers apparently fell out of through the early sixteenth centuries.123 fashion in Safavid Iran, but it seems to have What is more, the album H. 2153 begins been highly appreciated in the Ottoman con- to hint at the subsequent replacement of text, perhaps through the influence of ʿAbd China by Europe, as the principal source al-Rahim al-Khvarazmi al-Yaʿqubi’s students of foreign inspiration for the Persianate who may have joined Bayezid II’s and/or his pictorial arts that would be cultivated in successor Selim I’s courts. (Oral communi- the early modern Islamic courts. cation with Simon Rettig, who suspects that the move of these calligraphers from Tabriz to the Ottoman realm started as early as the 123 On the “paragone”, or “intercultural artistic 1490s and reached a peak during the Safavid comparison” in Dust Muhammad’s preface, period, between 1501 and 1514.) see Roxburgh, The Persian Album, pp. 295–304.

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