Jewel of a show - Shahnameh's 1,000 years

The curator says she can't help using superlatives in
talking about the exhibition, which runs at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery
in Washington through April 17, 2011.
"Even though it's not a large show, I think it's
probably one of the finest shows we've put together in terms of quality. The
paintings that you see here are the envy of every museum in the United
States," said Massumeh Farhad, the Sackler's chief curator and its curator
of Islamic art, as she guided reporters around the exhibition of illustrations
from royal editions of the Shahnameh, Iran's Book of Kings.
The Shahnameh is not widely known to Americans who have
no personal connection to Iran. Farhad stressed its importance in Persian
literature and life: as a source of children's stories - including some scary
ones - and "wonderfully colorful characters" and as an expression of
Iranian myth, legend and history. It covers the reigns of 50 kings, real and
imagined, from the creation of the world up to the Arab conquest of Iran in the
7th century.
"Every household has a Shahnameh," she said of
Iranian families. "So if you are literate, you can read the stories, (and
for a child) the stories would be read to you. Even if you are illiterate,
Shahnamehs were recited in coffeehouses, or there were wandering storytellers
who would go from village to village and tell these stories," continuing
the oral tradition from which the poet Firdausi drew many of his stories in the
first place.
Farhad conceded that the museum can't be precise about
marking the Shahnameh's 1,000th anniversary: Little is certain about Firdausi
and his masterwork, and no first edition with a publication date is available.
Firdausi is said to have written the Shahnameh over nearly 30 years for the
Samanids, "the first dynasty to encourage the revival of Persian
literature" after the Arab conquest, Farhad said. But the Samanids were
out of power by the time he finished the work, and he presented it to the
Ghaznavid ruler, Mahmud, who was less interested in a book that would celebrate
Iran's culture and language.
Nonetheless, Farhad said, it became important for Iranian
kings of all sorts to have a personal connection to the Iranian Book of Kings,
long before the advent of movable type, by having their calligraphers and
artists produce elaborate copies for the king's use. The earliest surviving
illustrated copies of the Shahnameh date to the 14th century, when Mongols
controlled the area; Farhad referred to the copy from the 1330s as the Great
Mongol Shahnameh. The 1520s version is known as the Tahmasb Shahnameh, for the
king for whom it was made.
Among the other editions represented at the exhibition is
a book made for Tahmasb's son Ismail; that book was not completed because
Ismail reigned for only a year.
"It was almost like a badge of honor: You come to
the throne, you make yourself a copy of the Shahnameh," Farhad said.
Although kings are responsible for the copies of the
Shahnameh most prized as works of art, Farhad said, it wasn't kings who made
the book popular, and illustrated editions eventually appeared in every Iranian
home that could afford one.
"The Shahnameh is the most frequently illustrated
text in the Islamic world, bar none. And the reason for this is quite obvious:
because Firdausi's text really appeals to or has appealed over the centuries to
everyone, from rulers to ... schoolchildren," she said. "You have a
whole host of characters who really lend themselves to illustration, as you see
on these folios."
With the artists who produced the royal copies of the
Shahnameh, though, the book truly blossomed.
The creation of as elaborate a volume as the Tahmasb
Shahnameh is thought to have taken as much as 20 years. Farhad said the royal
librarian would have planned the book, deciding which scenes would be
illustrated. Each illustration would typically occupy most of a page, with
verses above it ending with the scene on the page, and the calligraphers would
map out their work so that each verse fell in the proper place.
A team of artists and assistants would paint the scenes
in microscopic detail directly onto the paper with opaque watercolors plus gold
and silver. The assistants would prepare the materials, the younger artists
would paint the backgrounds, and the master artists would paint the main
sections.
The artists and calligraphers are anonymous; Farhad said
the tradition of signing works did not begin among Persian painters until the
end of the 16th century.
Farhad pointed out details in the Tahmasb painting of Zal
in the nest of the simurgh. The hero Zal, rejected and abandoned by his father
because Zal was an albino, was taken and raised by the mythical bird on a
remote mountaintop. In the painting, members of a caravan have spotted the
remarkable young man; what they don't see, and what the casual viewer will
miss, are the remarkable creatures hidden in the rocks and bushes of the
magical landscape.
"It's hard to believe that anyone can actually paint
so finely," she said.
Farhad suggested that while examining the paintings in
their frames on the walls of the Sackler Gallery, visitors should imagine them
in their proper place: in a book they are reading.
"You have to remember that this [Tahmasb]
manuscript, even though it was a big manuscript - this manuscript originally
had 258 illustrations, so it would have been quite a hefty tome - but still,
the king would probably ...sit down and sort of hold it in his hands."
When holding the book, "you have a much closer relationship and you can
really focus on the details," she said. "It's a very different visual
experience than seeing a painting hanging on the wall."
Unfortunately, she said, "we cannot have these
folios and sort of pass them around from one person to the other."
Farhad lamented the "desecration" that had
brought the paintings from centuries-old books to the museum's walls. The
French art dealer Georges Demotte obtained the 14th-century Great Mongol
Shahnameh in the early 20th century and cut out illustrated pages to sell
individually. Rare-book collector Arthur A. Houghton Jr. did the same with the
Tahmasb Shahnameh beginning in the 1960s, and some of those ended up at the
Sackler. The bulk of the book, with many of the illustrations remaining,
eventually was bartered for a modern work - a portrait of Marilyn Monroe by
Willem de Kooning - and became the property of the Museum of Contemporary Art
in Tehran.
— Jeff Baron is a staff writer at www.america.gov