MINIATURE FROM MS. OF THE ASTRONOMICAL TREATISE OF ABD-ER-RAHMAN EL-SUFI; IN THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF FRANCE
This is an inevitable impression, but a radically false one, as a careful and prolonged examination of the documents easily enables us to see. ¶ On the contrary, the world of Islam produced schools of which each had its own methods and types. By comparing manuscripts of the same date and origin, one perceives that, without exception, they present the same pictures, and that, moreover, those pictures are very nearly identical. They offer hardly the smallest variations in detail, while in workmanship and in the general plan of the composition they are strictly alike. It is thus that, in all the ‘Books of the Kings’ illustrated in Persia during the time of the Sefevæan kings, we find the same scenes treated in identical fashion, with more or less finish, according to the price of the book; in the same way, all the manuscripts of the life of the famous Sufis of Sultan Husein Mirza contain identical paintings, which are hardly differentiated one from the other and which are evidently replicas of a common original, drawn and painted by an artist of talent, the head of a school. ¶ No illuminated Arab manuscript is known of an earlier date than the thirteenth century, and the reason of this is simple. So long as the caliphate of Bagdad was sufficiently powerful, or, at least, preserved sufficient moral authority, to cause the Mussulman law to be respected in its integrity, none dared to violate one of the strictest injunctions of the Sunna. The artists, both in the Persian world and among the Mussulmans of Syria and Egypt, waited for the day of the final decadence of the spiritual power before venturing to transgress the formal prohibition against the reproduction, by any process whatever, of the human figure, or even of animal forms. ¶ Arab books adorned with pictures (of indifferent merit) appeared first in the empire of the Aiyubite sultans descended from Saladin. This innovation raised a storm among the ulemas and men of law, who looked upon it as an abomination; but the Aiyubite sovereigns, although loudly proclaiming themselves the stoutest defenders of the Caliph of Bagdad, were but little interested to know whether a thing was orthodox or not. Had not Saladin built in the very heart of Cairo a college for the Bathenians, whose doctrines, a hundred times anathematized by the Abbasside caliphs, tended to prove that there existed neither Allah nor Mohammed, and that the only possible divinity was the prime mover, the first hypostasis, the absolute One of the Neoplatonists? The Aiyubites troubled themselves so little about the prohibition against reproducing the human figure that they had coins struck in Syria bearing on the obverse the head of the Byzantine Christ and on the reverse the usual inscriptions in the Arab tongue. Saladin even went so far—and this is the acme of heterodoxy—as to plan a marriage between his brother Melik Adel and the sister of Richard Cœur-de-Lion, King of England. The Mussulman artists would have been very wrong not to have taken it at their ease under the reign of such liberal princes; and therefore, beginning with the extreme end of the twelfth century, we behold the first appearance of illuminated Arab manuscripts. ¶ These Arab manuscripts adorned with paintings are of the greatest rarity, and are not generally distinguished for their execution. They are curious documents, worthy of preservation because of their rarity, rather than real works of art, and the painters who illuminated them were never very careful with their work. They betrayed an almost complete lack of imagination and invention, and confined themselves to copying as best they could the illuminated pictures in the manuscripts at their disposal, that is to say the Byzantine manuscripts, in Egypt and Syria: as for the Mussulmans of the Maghreb and the Yemen, it never occurred to their minds that it was possible to adorn a book with pictures. The greater number of the pictures in Arab manuscripts are copied from Byzantine manuscripts of the eighth to the eleventh century, and the limners, not knowing what they were copying, often surrounded the heads of their figures with the golden haloes of the saints of the Greek Church. ¶ There are only very few Arab manuscripts the pictures of which rise above the conventional commonplace level, although they always display very evident traces of Byzantine influence. The most important of these manuscripts is a copy of the Makāmāt (‘assemblies,’ or séances) of Harīrī, which belongs to M. Charles Schefer. A very curious painting from this manuscript, which was copied in Mesopotamia in the year 1237, is reproduced in the present article. It shows a troop of horsemen in the army of the Abbasside caliph, carrying the black silk standard of the Abbas family and sounding enormous trumpets. This picture, which is far from possessing the merit of the miniatures that adorn the Persian manuscripts, presents to us, in a life-like manner, a scene which must have been frequent in the streets of Bagdad and Damascus; the costumes and the harness of the horses are absolutely correct and correspond in every respect with the descriptions of apparel to be found at random in the Arab historians. One fact which goes to show that Arab art, at least in Syria, assumed a considerable development at that time is that we possess two other manuscripts of these séances of Harīrī less fine than the one in question, but illuminated by artists who evidently belong to the same school. ¶ These painters of the Aiyubite period considered that Byzantine art, itself very limited and restricted almost exclusively to religious painting, did not offer a large enough variety of models, and they looked around them for others. These were so rare that our artists were sometimes content to reproduce Egyptian stelæ, or to draw their inspiration from the statues of Pharaohs or divinities which they encountered at every step on Egyptian soil, copying to the best of their ability the hieroglyphic characters which they found on those monuments and of which they understood not a word. In short, painting never existed on Arab manuscripts save by way of exception and in a sporadic state; and yet the Arab artists suffered from no lack of subjects for illustration. What an inexhaustible mine the ‘Thousand Nights and a Night’ would have supplied, and the heroic romances of ‘Antarah, of Sultan Zahir Bibars, or the ‘History of the Heroes of Islamism’ (Siret el-mujāhidin)! A few Arab manuscripts copied in Persia are adorned with paintings, generally of indifferent merit, but it is very evident that these do not belong to Arab art properly so called, and that they must be included among the productions of Iranian art. ¶ The only ornamentation of the Arab manuscripts consists of the illumination of the titles and the first pages of the text. They are not so fine as those done in Persia, although we find copies of the Koran, written on parchment, richly illuminated with gilded designs. But this ornamentation, reduced to a very small number of colours and with broken lines, is heavy and overladen with gildings: the Persians were more sober and showed that they had less taste for tinsel.
MINIATURE FROM ‘THE BOOK OF KINGS,’ A PERSIAN MS. OF 1566; IN THE COLLECTION OF BARON EDOUARD DE ROTHSCHILD
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The artistic history of Persia begins with the Achæmenian kings, that is to say in the fifth century before Christ, a very recent date compared with the antiquity of the ancient Assyrian and Chaldean empires. Like all the countries of Hither Asia, the Persia of the Achæmenians was tributary to the Babylonian Empire, and the monuments of Persepolis and Murghab are obviously copied from those of the valley of the Euphrates, while showing signs of a strong Hellenic influence. In fact, the influence of Greece in Persia began long before the conquest by Alexander, and the subjects of the Great Kings had happily lightened the heavy architecture and ponderous sculpture of Babylon by taking their inspiration from the methods of the artists of Hellas. It is thus that the Apadana of Persepolis, the Apadana of Esther and Xerxes, is a compromise between the oldest works of Assyrian art and the most grandiose specimens of Greek architecture, between the Palace of Sargon, which it suggests by the elevation of its immense walls and its heavy friezes, and the Parthenon, in which we find the colonnade of the Persian edifice, which the architecture of the Euphrates valley always ignored. The casings in many-coloured bricks which adorn the Apadana were borrowed by the Persians from Chaldean, or rather Assyrian art; and the frieze of the Archers has its prototype in the glazed-brick low-reliefs of the Dur-Sarkayan. The workmanship of those polychromatic casings has changed very little in the course of the ages, and the methods employed by the brick-makers who, in the sixteenth century, adorned the splendid mosques of the Sefevæan kings at Ardabil and Veramin with sky-blue and pale-green mosaics were almost identical with those of the artists of the time of Sargon and Nebuchadnezzar. ¶ The Greek influence attained its height in Iran after the conquest by Alexander, under the reign of the Arsacidan princes who assumed the title of Philhellenes on their coinage. The Sāsānians, while endeavouring to bring about a reaction against that influence which had several times threatened to deprive Iran of all its autonomy, were unable, at least at the commencement of their dynasty, to dispense with the aid of the Greek artists, and the inscriptions of the early kings of that dynasty are accompanied by a Greek translation. ¶ The art and methods of construction of the period of the Sāsānian kings were perpetuated long after the Mussulman conquest; and the ogival doorways of the Timurid mosques of Samarcand or of the mosques of the Sefevæan shahs recall, although with a much less imposing aspect, the gigantic ogive, the Ivān, to-day half-ruined, of the Palace of the Sāsānians at Ctesiphon, which, according to the Islam tradition, was rent in two during the night in which Mohammed came into the world. The Mussulman architects who built the powerful citadels which stayed the onrush of the crusaders in Syria also derived their inspiration from the Sāsānian tradition, and it was thus that the gothic style made its way into the art of the east and ended by supplanting the Roman style. ¶ If the influence of Greek art was considerable in Ancient Persia, it was null in Persian art according to Islam; for there was scarcely any point of contact between the Byzantine world in its decline and Persia subjugated by the arms of the caliphs and separated from the west by Syria and the provinces that formed the Seljukian empire of Asia Minor. Nevertheless there exist a few rare specimens of Persian painting of the end of the thirteenth century which recall in a positive fashion the methods of Hellenic art; but there is no doubt that the works which they serve to illustrate are merely translations of Arab originals written in Syria and containing miniatures imitated from Byzantine types. The Persian limners confined themselves to reproducing those paintings at the same time that the Arab works were being translated into the Persian language, and we must beware of seeing in this the trace of any post-Islamic influence of Byzantine art. ¶ The three great schools of painting in Persia succeed one another without interruption and, encroaching one on the other from the beginning of the thirteenth century to the early years of the eighteenth century, correspond with the three great dominations which held sway over Iran during this period of nearly five centuries: the Mongolians, the Timurids and the Sefevæans. Books adorned with paintings, in fact, make their first appearance with the dynasty of the Mongolian sovereigns, whose ancestor, Hulagu, was sent to conquer Persia by the Emperor of China, Manchu. Although the dynasties which had made themselves independent in Persia, up to the Seljukians, had taken matters easily with the Abbasside caliphate, it is no less true that they were deeply attached to Islamism and that men hesitated under their dominion openly to transgress the prescription of the religious law. The Mongolian sovereigns, at least the first, did not profess Islamism and even greatly preferred Christianity to the Mussulman religion, although not themselves Christians. Some of them, such as Hulagu, had Christian wives, and they often protected the Christians to the detriment of the votaries of Mohammed. We know from the narrative of the missionaries who were sent on embassy to the court of the Grand Khan of Cathay—Jean du Plan de Carpin, Guillaume de Ruysbroeck and others—that the Mongols made very coarse representations of their divinity Itoga and of other spirits of an inferior order. Like all the primitives, they greatly loved to see themselves pictured in paintings, and the manuscripts which date from the time of the Mongolian sovereigns of Persia are filled with portraits of the Khans, different nobles accompanied by their wives and engaged in drinking fermented mare’s milk in cups of Chinese porcelain. The Mongols, when they issued from their steppes bent upon the conquest of the world, were certainly the most ignorant people conceivable, for which reason they were surrounded by Chinese secretaries, interpreters, engineers and bureaucrats, without whom they would have been helpless. All this yellow flood swept down upon Persia and there settled as in a conquered country, introducing numbers of Turkish words into the language and, into art, not the formulas of the Turks and Mongols, because these had none, but those of the Celestial empire. It is certain that the Chinese artists whom the Mongols had brought with them to Persia understood the technicalities of painting infinitely better than did the Iranians, even as the Chinese accountants could easily have given lessons to all the financial clerks of the Sāmānids or Seljukians. And so the Persian painters sat at the feet of the Chinese and eventually came to create an art which was very different from that of the Celestial empire, but which nevertheless displays many characteristics of Chinese painting. In any case, it is certain that the miniatures which adorn the Persian manuscripts from the time of the Mongols have no connexion whatever with what is known to us of the art of the Sāsānidans, or with the descriptions given by Mas‘ūdī of pictures which he had seen at Persepolis in a book and by the unknown author of a chronicle entitled the ‘Sum of Histories.’ ¶ The manuscripts illuminated in Persia and in the regions that depended upon her during the Mongolian period (1258–1335) are very numerous and all present the same characteristics: the artists who illuminated them drew, above all, battle-scenes, sieges of fortresses, bloody contests, or else banquets, for the Mongols were, according to the account of travellers, great quaffers of strong liquors. These pictures, however, are rarely so well executed as those which belong to the school of the Timurids and the Sefevæans: the Mongols were people who were not hard to please; they wished before all things to be served quickly; and with them quantity easily took the place of quality. It may be remarked that the manuscripts executed at that time contain a very considerable number of paintings; but, though these paintings possess a great documentary interest, they have but a feeble interest from the artistic point of view. Some of them are merely wash-drawings in uniform tints rather than paintings in the proper sense of the word.
MINIATURE FROM ‘THE BOOK OF KINGS,’ A PERSIAN MS, OF 1566; IN THE COLLECTION OF BARON EDOUARD DE ROTHSCHILD
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