Open Collections

Abstract

The art of painting encompasses a variety of mediums in the Persianate world, but miniature paintings within book manuscripts have attracted special scholarly attention. The valuation and conception of Persian miniature painting within the context of illustrated manuscripts from the Medieval period has been controversial. More recent scholars of the arts of the book challenge the earlier scholarship, which perceived illustrations of the manuscripts as representations of Persian classical painting and defined them within a single and a generalized formulation. One important reason behind the emergence of Persian classical painting as an aesthetic category had to do with the way that Persian painting became available to their European and North American audiences. Although there were many intact manuscripts, most of them, especially the Shahnamas, were dismantled and dispersed. Hence, rather than seeing the paintings in the context of their respective manuscripts, the audiences saw them as single paintings. This thesis is therefore concerned with dismantlement and dispersal of Persian manuscripts, and their commodification in the art market. The primary object of study here is one of the most well-known Shahnama manuscripts, called Shahnama Shah-Tahmasp (1524-1540), commissioned by the Persian Safavid ruler Shah Tahmasp, and presented to the Ottoman Sultan Selim II as an enthronement gift in 1568. I am going to approach the afterlife of this manuscript through a critical discussion of Orientalism, as it has been foundational in the emergence of an art market for Islamic manuscript paintings, and in the establishment of Islamic art history as an academic field, and subsequently, Persian painting as a subfield. I am also going to shed a critical lens on how concepts, methods, and categories from Renaissance scholarship, including “the classical,” were transposed on to studies on Persian painting, culminating not only in the classical Persian painting as a category, but also in the attribution of a single author to the Shahnama. To better understand this trajectory, I incorporate an analysis of the socio-political, cultural and economic transformations that European countries, the Ottoman Empire and Iran experienced between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This thesis weaves together the multiple factors that contributed to the separation of the images from the manuscript and their dispersal across the globe to numerous museums, galleries and private collections.