The schools of painting of the Mongolian period did not last long in Persia, and it would seem as though, from the moment when the descendants of Hulagu became converted to Islamism, people in Persia began to look with an evil eye upon picture-books and those who painted them. Moreover, the Mongolian dynasty gave way amid so great a chaos and such infinite disorder that the Persians had too many other things to occupy their minds to allow them to think of illustrating their ‘Books of the Kings’ or the Gulistān of the Sheikh Sa‘dī. We still find in the great European libraries a few manuscripts illuminated for the Djelairids or the Mozafferids; but the political instability of Iran was at that time so great that two copies of the same work are sometimes dedicated to two successive sovereigns. ¶ The accession of Timur Bey put an end to this anarchy, which, for that matter, was to begin again a century later, and the reign of his successor, Shah-Rokh, was a period of peace such as Persia had not known since long. Under the reign of this pacific prince, who waged no war until driven to extremes by his kinsmen, there was executed, at Herat, one of the most splendid specimens of Iranian painting, the manuscript of the ‘Ascension of Mohammed to Heaven.’ Illuminated books belonging to the Timurid school of Persia and Turkestan are not excessively rare, and we must look among them to find the master-pieces of Persian painting. A certain number of these volumes come from the libraries of the Timurids, principally from that of Herat, where Sultan Husain Mirza had collected a magnificent library, which has now completely disappeared. ¶ These Timurid sovereigns, including those who reigned in the east of Persia and in Transoxiana after the death of Tamerlane (Timur Bey) as well as those who went to seek their fortune in Hindustan, were great lovers of works of art and of fine literature. At Samarcand, they raised the splendid mosques, now ruined, which were the ornament of the Righistan—the Tilla-kari, Bibi-khanum and Guri-Mir—whose gutted cupolas, all enamelled with many-coloured bricks, still excite the admiration of archæologists. Timur Bey, whom the pamphlet of Ibn-Arabshah did not a little to represent as a vulgar toper, delighted in reading the Ghazels of Hāfiz and the ‘Romance of Alexander’ of Nizāmī. Some of his writings are master-pieces of Turco-Oriental literature, and the unauthenticity of his Memoirs has never been absolutely proved. His grandson, Ulugh Beg, was the Alfonso X of the east, and the astronomical tables which he drew up with the aid of the most celebrated cosmographers form one of the most important works of Oriental mathematics. Sultan Husain ibn Baïkara lived in his capital of Herat surrounded by the most famous writers of his time—‘Alī Shīr his Vizir, the illustrious Sūfī Jāmī, Khwānd-Amīr the historian—and his collection of biographies of Mussulman saints is one of the master-pieces of elegant prose produced by Persian literature. ¶ The Emperor Babar, who, when the Timurid empire was definitely ruined in Persia, went away to conquer Hindustan, has left a sober and severe history of his long campaigns which recalls Caesar’s ‘Commentaries.’ In the midst of their intrigues and of the crimes which they did not hesitate to commit to obtain possession of the throne, his descendants, the Grand Moguls of Delhi, never lost their passion for works of art. The Emperor Shah-Jahan, who, in order to assume the crown, had revolted against his father and killed off all his brothers, found time, on the very day of his accession, to inscribe his ex-libris on a magnificent copy of one of the six poems of Jāmī; it is true that this volume was a family record, and that it had been copied for his ancestor, the sovereign of Herat, Sultan Husain Mirza. The Timurids of Hindustan retained this passion for fine books until the worst days of their history. Copies bearing the seal of Mohammed Shah or of Ferrukh Siyyar are not at all rare, and Shah Alem II enriched the library of the Grand Moguls even at the time when he was being torn between the English, the Mahrattas and the French, and when his empire was on the point of passing under a foreign dominion. ¶ The influence of Chinese art is even more marked in the paintings of the Timurid school of Khorassan than in those of the Mongols of Persia, and it is open to us to ask ourselves whether they were executed by Persians trained in the school of the Chinese, or by Chinese striving to produce something in the Persian taste. If a doubt be permissible in the case of the manuscript of the ‘Ascension of Mohammed,’ none such can be entertained concerning a manuscript which was copied at Samarcand for Sultan Mirza Ulugh Beg and which contains the Arab text of an astronomical treatise famous in the East, that of ‘Abd ur-Rahmān el-Sūfī. One of the pictures adorning this magnificent manuscript is reproduced in the present article, and it is easy to see, even in the absence of colour, that the drawing shows an evident Chinese influence. The lightness of the outlines and of the painting, reduced to a few tints of Chinese ink in the shadows and a few threads of colour, reminds one in an extraordinary manner of the methods of the Japanese artists. This same characteristic occurs also, although in a less pronounced degree, in the miniatures on the manuscript of the ‘Ascension of Mohammed’; but the heads of the chimera on which the Prophet is mounted and of the angels recall the chubby faces on certain paintings or certain ivories of the Far East. ¶ We know from an undoubted source that the Timurids of Turkestan and Eastern Persia were pleased to make calls upon the artists of the Celestial empire, and that one of those sultans had set up at the gates of Samarcand a Trianon in Chinese porcelain which had been brought in sections, with every piece numbered, to the Athens of Turkestan. It is therefore no matter for surprise that we should find in the paintings of many manuscripts which formed the libraries of Herat and Samarcand traces of so deep and so protracted an influence. These miniatures are always infinitely better executed than are those of the Mongolian school, and we feel that they appeal to men of a different and more refined form of culture than the cavalry leaders who organized the bold raids across the Asiatic continent. They represent fewer scenes of carnage and, above all, fewer horsemen barbed and iron-clad to their eyes than fill the paintings of the Mongolian manuscripts. The sultans of Turkestan made war upon one another in order to steal the others’ crowns, but they did not do so as brutes greedy of slaughter and scenes of bloodshed: often warfare was their only means of living and of defending themselves against the incessant attacks of their rapacious kinsmen. ¶ The transition from the school of Turkestan at the time of the princes of the House of Timur to the third great school of painting in Persia, that of the Sefevæans, was not so clearly defined as that which separates the Mongolian from the Timurid school. There was, towards the end of the fifteenth century, a certain period during which the Persian artists endeavoured to produce something new, while retaining, in a great measure, the method of the miniature-painters of Turkestan. To this transition period belongs the manuscript of the ‘Book of the Kings,’ the property of M. de Rothschild, of which two reproductions will be found in these pages, and also the miniature representing a hunting-scene which is taken from a splendid manuscript, dated 1527, from the divan of Mīr ‘Alī Shīr Navā’ī, Vizir to the Timurid Sultan Husain Mirza. ¶ Obviously the master-pieces of Mussulman painting are to be sought among the miniatures executed at Herat and Samarcand in the fifteenth century; but this does not prevent the miniatures painted in Western Persia under the reign of the Sefevis (fifteenth to seventeenth century) from being splendid works of art. The number of illuminated manuscripts dating from this period is relatively large. This does not imply that there were many more painted in Persia under Shah Abbas than during the time of the Timurids, but simply that, being more modern, there were fewer of them lost.
(To Be continued.)
HUNTING SCENE; MINIATURE FROM A PERSIAN MS. DATED 1527; IN THE NATIONAL LIBRARY OF FRANCE
⇒
LARGER IMAGE
PLATE I
Walker & Cockerell Ph. Sc.
The Election Cup belonging to Winchester College.
⇒
LARGER IMAGE