Download PDF | ( Edinburgh Studies In Islamic Art) Sheila Blair Text And Image In Persian Art From The Samanids To The Safavids Edinburgh University Press ( 2013)
353 Pages
Series Editor’s Foreword
“Edinburgh Studies in Islamic Art” is a new venture that offers readers easy access to the most up-to-date research across the whole range of Islamic art. Building on the long and distinguished tradition of Edinburgh University Press in publishing books on the Islamic world, it is intended to be a forum for studies that, while closely focused, also open wide horizons. Books in the series will, for example, concentrate in an accessible way on the art of a single century, dynasty or geographical area; on the meaning of works of art; on a given medium in a restricted time frame; or on analyses of key works in their wider contexts. A balance will be maintained as far as possible between successive titles, so that various parts of the Islamic world and various media and approaches are represented.
Books in the series are academic monographs of intellectual distinction that mark a significant advance in the field. While they are naturally aimed at an advanced and graduate academic audience, a complementary target readership is the world-wide community of specialists in Islamic art—professionals who work in universities, research institutes, auction houses, and museums—as well as that elusive character, the interested general reader.
Professor Robert Hillenbrand
Preface
A single author typically gets credit for a book, but it is really the work of many. In writing this monograph numerous colleagues have assisted me, patiently answering queries, providing references, offering critiques. I have tried to credit them individually for the help they so generously offered, and if I have overlooked some names, I apologize for any inadvertent omissions. Here, I should like to acknowledge those who offered broader, if sometimes unrecognized, assistance. I was touched by the generous hospitality offered by the people of Iran. When I was preparing for the lectures on which this book is based, I was able to take a fleeting trip to Azerbaijan in May 2009, and everywhere I traveled, the local residents greeted me enthusiastically. I wanted to return in 2011 to travel through Khurasan, but was unable to obtain a visa, a sad commentary on how politics affects art.
On the academic level, I thank all the students in my classes at Boston College, who have provided feedback on lectures about these very kinds of objects. Their input has been invaluable in showing me what can work and what flops. I am grateful also for the superb research facilities provided by Boston College and its libraries, especially the interlibrary loan department which never flinched at my many, sometimes strange, requests.
Many collaborators at Edinburgh University Press helped me navigate the sometimes winding path to publication. Nicola Ramsey willingly took on the project and encouraged me along the way. Eddie Clark cheerfully oversaw production, never blanching at the snags and delays. Ellie Bush ably acquired many of the photographs and the permissions to use them, sometimes from most obscure places. Anna Stevenson smoothed inconsistences of text and infelicities of style. I thank them all and trust that I was not too snarky in replying to their well-intentioned comments and queries.
Several colleagues also deserve special mention here. Wheeler Thackston was ready at every moment to read, reread, and explicate Persian and Arabic texts. Linda Komaroff and Robert Hillenbrand both read the entire manuscript and saved me from several mistakes and oversights.
But the most credit goes to my family, who support me in all my scholarly endeavors: our children Felicity and Oliver, who are amused by their mother’s passion for a country that is typically reviled in their homeland; our dog Sheba, who affords comfort when things look gloomy; and most of all my husband Jonathan Bloom, who not only provides unstinting academic support, including many of the architectural photographs published here, but also offers genial company and inspirational cooking that have sustained me throughout. I thank them, and all the others, warmly.
Richmond, NH, January 2013
Introduction
Listen to the reed, how it tells its tales, Bemoaning its bitter exile, it wails: Ever since I was torn from the reed beds, My cries tear men’s and women’s hearts to shreds.!
MANY READERS FAMILIAR with Persian literature will recognize these verses from the Mathnavi-yi manavi (The Mathnavi of Intrinsic Meaning) by Mawlavi (1207-73), often known as Jalal al-Din Rumi and since the late twentieth century the best-selling poet in the United States.2 Sometimes dubbed “the Qur’an in Persian,” his 27,000-couplet encyclopedia of Sufism opens with one of the most stunning images in Persian poetry. The verses relate the reed’s anguish in being separated from its reed bed. They work metaphorically on several levels. Through the act of lamenting, the reed is personified and thus stands for the poet, who—like the reed—was torn from his native region of Balkh and forced by the Mongol invasions to flee some 3,000 km/2,000 miles westward to Konya.’ The reed’s song, then, is the poem. And by analogy, the reed, which is also the material for the pen (qalam), becomes not just the spoken but also the written word of the poet. Rumi here alludes as well to the duality of the Qur’an, first an oral revelation, but soon and more often seen as a written codex.
But why, readers may ask, did I choose to begin a book on the visual arts in medieval Persia by analyzing the complex metaphors of a poem? First, the reference is a tribute to Ehsan Yarshater, the renowned scholar honored in the series of lectures from which this book derives,+ for he was one of the first scholars to raise the connection between Persian poetry and the visual arts produced in the region. In a paper delivered to the IV International Congress of Iranian Art and Archeology in New York more than half a century
Figure 1.1 Silver-gilt dish with relief decoration showing a banquet in Sasanian style. Diameter 19.7 cm. London, British Museum.
This dish, probably made in Tabaristan in the seventh or eighth century before the advent of Islam there, continues a type known from Sasanian times, showing a ruler banqueting at a wine feast (bazm).
ago in 1960, he analyzed such common themes as abstraction, sensuality, and harmony.° Prof. Yarshater raised an important topic, and the connection between the visual and the verbal arts is one of increasing interest to historians of medieval art, whether working on Europe, Byzantium, or the Islamic lands.°
Prof. Yarshater’s groundbreaking essay drew from the classical period of Persian poetry, ranging from works by Rudaki (858-c. 941) to those by Jami (1414~-92)],’ and thus his time frame—the tenth century to the turn of the sixteenth—is basically the same as the one covered in this book. Like Prof. Yarshater, I chose to begin with the period of Samanid rule, when Persia regained its political autonomy and its cultural identity.® In artistic terms, this is the time when one can draw a break in the visual arts from Sasanian or post-Sasanian styles (Figure 1.1) toa new “Islamic” style, one of whose characteristics is writing in Arabic script (Figure 1.2}.? The relationship between the verbal and the visual and the kinds of puns that run through both are themes that are central to this book.
I end with the rise of Safavid rule in the early sixteenth century.
Figure 1.2 Small silver dish with harpy and inscription around the rim. Diameter 14.2 cm. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
This small silver dish, attributed to Gurgan in the second quarter of the eleventh century, illustrates the use of writing in Arabic script that became a hallmark of the new “Islamic” style.
The turn of the sixteenth century was a major watershed not only in the history of Iran but also in world history, as the crossing of the Atlantic and the rounding of Africa dramatically shifted the global situation, ushering in the so-called pre-modern era characterized in the Islamic lands by the establishment of “gunpowder” empires.!° The Shi‘ite Safavids in Iran, sandwiched between the Sunni Mughals and Ottomans, were emblematic of this period in which the preeminence of Iranian ideas was challenged by rival powers to the east and west. Within Persia, this change in global geography is reflected in the shift of capital and economic focus to the city of Isfahan, set in the middle of the plateau and within striking distance of the Persian Gulf, a response in part to the increased role of maritime trade with Europe and beyond." This period also marks a time by which Persia had developed a tradition of looking back at itself, particularly through the arts, as shown in Chapter 6.
This book then covers what is often called Persian art in “middle Islamic period.” !* And, like Prof. Yarshater, I take Persia to mean the lands where Persian was the main language of culture, thus including
parts of what is now territory from Afghanistan and Central Asia on the east to Iraq, Turkey, and Azerbaijan on the west (Figure 1.3).
To trace the artistic changes in Persian art in this middle period, I have chosen to focus on five individual works of art: 1) a slip-covered earthenware bowl made in the eastern Iranian lands in the late tenth century; 2) an inlaid bronze rosewater sprinkler, attributable to Herat c. 1200; 3) the tomb erected in honor of the Ilkhanid sultan Uljaytu at Sultaniyya between 1305 and 1320; 4) a painting from an illustrated manuscript of three poems by Khwaju Kirmani made for the Jalayirid sultan Ahmad at Baghdad in 798/1396; and 5) the matched pair of carpets made for the shrine at Ardabil in Azerbaijan in 946/15 39-40.
My choices are far from random. These five works of art exemplify the main artistic media produced in Persia at this time: ceramics, metalware, architecture, painting, and textiles.'!’ This is not to underrate the importance of other media such as glass, ivory, or rock crystal, each of which could bear its own study. Rather it is simply an acknowledgment of the hierarchy of use and the constrictions of time and space of both lectures and printed form.
I chose these five objects, furthermore, for their chronological and geographic spread. The first two (the earthenware bowl and the bronze rosewater sprinkler) exemplify artistic production in eastern Iran in pre-Mongol times when that region underwent a major economic and cultural florescence. The latter three objects (the tomb, the illustrated manuscript, and the pair of carpets) show the shift to northwestern Iran and Iraq following the Mongol invasions in the thirteenth century when that region gained ascendancy and where, as the historian Bert Fragner has argued, the Ilkhanids “reinvented Iran.”'4
Along with these geographic and temporal divisions, the five objects also represent a shift in patronage and consumption. The first two from eastern Iran in the pre-Mongol period exemplify the type of wares made en masse for the well-to-do and learned classes. The latter three were made for specific rulers at court.
The five are not newly discovered objects. On the contrary, they are all well known and well published, often because they represent the finest of their type, whether the largest, the best made, the best designed, or the best preserved. I chose them therefore for their typological value. In each case, I begin with a description of the object, starting with its material and technique, and then move to a broader discussion of the type in order to set the object in its wider context, a context that extends from the time of production up to the present.
Such a focus on placing the work of art in context relates in turn to the opening verses from the Mathnavi. As with Mawlavi’s reed, so too these works of art can often seem deracinated when displayed in museum cases. Museums have traditionally been dedicated to displaying works of art as objects of admiration. The Louvre, which opened in 1793, is often considered the first encyclopedic public museum, and in the words of Peter Brooks, the critic and professor of comparative literature, it “realized a kind of Kantian ideal for art as the object of disinterested contemplation.” !5
The battle over the role of the museum as the locus where art is stripped from its original context and shown in a new setting is still with us in the twenty-first century.!° Some museums today are trying to overcome this limitation and better approximate or evoke the way the work of art was experienced, whether physically or historically. In the 1990s, for example, when the curators at the Victoria and Albert museum (V&A) decided to redo the display of Islamic art, they made their Ardabil carpet the centerpiece of the new Jameel Gallery of Islamic Art, which opened in July 2006. To do so, they took the carpet off the wall and put it on the floor (6.3) so that viewers would encounter it physically in the way that it had originally been designed to be seen.”
Many museums group objects by chronology to provide a sense of historical setting. In May 2009, when the David Collection opened its splendid new installation of Islamic art in an adjacent neoclassical row house facing Rosenborg Castle Gardens in the center of Copenhagen, the objects were displayed in small rooms arranged by dynasty, with text panels describing the historical context and touch screens with displays of coins to provide a dated context for events that occurred while the objects were being made.'!* The rosewater sprinkler discussed in Chapter 3, for example, is displayed there as part of a large case holding works in stone, metal, and wood made in eastern Iran, Afghanistan, and northern India between the tenth and twelfth centuries during the period of rule there by the Ghaznavids, Ghurids, and Saljuqs (Figure 1.4).
Buildings, too, can be placed in a setting. Thus, the ongoing excavations around the tomb of Uljaytu considered in Chapter 4 have not only cleared the crypt and ground around the building to expose parts of the surrounding walls (4.12) but have also uncovered numerous fragments of ceramics that formed part of the original setting. Such information is important in setting an individual building into its wider context, whether simply architectural, as the tomb was part of a multi-part pious foundation, or more broadly social, helping us to understand the services provided there and the links to the community. A fuller publication of the excavation should provide more information about the local urban planning and environment.
Nevertheless, few consider these works of art as functional objects that were meant to be used in everyday life, both tangibly and metaphorically or symbolically. In other words, scholars often do not look to elucidate the “social life of things” or their “cultural biographies,” phrases coined by anthropologists, or, to use the terms preferred by archeologists, the objects’ “life-histories.”!° Here, I look
Figure 1.4 View of the Ghurid gallery in the David Collection, Copenhagen.
In the last few decades the David Collection, a private museum in Copenhagen, has amassed a first-rate collection of objects from the eastern Islamic lands.
at these works of art not just as “signals from the past,””° but also as objects that have continued to have resonance up to and including the present day.
As a teacher, I have also set out to make this work accessible to both students and interested readers. The notes and bibliography provide extensive references, but I am also interested in showing how close looking, like close reading, can elicit information and how we can use that information to help reconstruct the past.
In many ways, then, the objects discussed here—both portable and architectural—are comparable metaphorically to Mawlavi’s reed, telling tales about their longing for their home. In this book, therefore, I try to resituate the works of art in the time of their creation and afterwards up to the present. My broader purpose is to use art to help us see and understand history and the changing nature of local society in Persia over the course of six centuries as well as its enduring impact today. Along the way, I hope to elucidate a recurrent theme in Iranian art: the increasingly complex roles of writing and images, and the evolving interaction between the two.
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