Persian Miniature Painting: Paradise Gardens and Sacred Narrative
Persian miniature painting — the tradition of illustrated manuscript art that flourished in the courts of Persia (Iran) from approximately the 13th through the 17th centuries — is one of the supreme achievements of Islamic civilization and one of the most sophisticated visual traditions in the history of world art. Where European manuscript illustration tended toward narrative clarity and theological instruction, Persian miniature painting pursued a different ideal: the creation of an image so dense with beauty, so perfectly organized in its color relationships and spatial arrangements, that the viewer's ordinary perception was suspended and replaced by something closer to the contemplative state that the poems it illustrated described. The great Shahnameh (Book of Kings) of Ferdowsi — the Persian national epic — and the mystical poems of Rumi, Hafez, Attar, and Nizami provided the primary narrative content; the painters of Herat, Tabriz, Shiraz, and Isfahan provided visual interpr...