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Lot Essay
The text of this panel relates what the Buyid Amir 'Izz al-Dawla said to the Hamdanid Abu Taghlab when he gave him his daughter in marriage. It is as it was related by Abi Ishaq al-Sabi, the Buyid official and man of letters and is related in the Muhadarat al-Udaba' of Raghib al-Isfahani, Beirut, 1961, vol.3, p.211.
The master calligrapher 'Abdallah Sayrafi was a native of the Ilkhanid capital Tabriz. According to both chroniclers Qadi Ahmad and Dust Muhammad, 'Abdallah Sayrafi was responsible for the calligraphic designs on numerous monumental architectural tiles in the city of Tabriz. These included several commissions from the local Chubanid dynasty for tiles to decorate buildings including the Dimashqiyya Madrassa and a building dedicated to the Ilkhanid ruler Sulayman ibn Yusufshah known as the 'Ala'iyya or the Sulaymaniyya. The earliest known work by 'Abdullah Sayrafi to survive is an album page dated AH 710/1310-11 AD held in the Topkapi (inv. B411, folio 70b.) and the latest work is a Qur'an manuscript in the Turk ve Islam Eserleri Muzesi (TIEM), also in Istanbul, dated AH 744/1343-44 AD. This places our panel approximately in the middle of 'Abdullah Sayrafi's known period of work, (Sheila S. Blair, Islamic Calligraphy, Edinburgh, 2008, p. 298)
The repeated elongation of the letters ba and kaf in the present panel indicates Sayrafi's familiarity with designing contemporary Ilkhanid architectural inscriptions, (Sheila S. Blair, op. Cit., p. 257).
The two first lines of this panel share almost exactly the same forms of 'lam-alef' and also the rounded vowel points as a copy of the Qur'an also signed by 'Abdullah Sayrafi in the Turk ve Islam Eserleri Muzesi (TIEM), in Istanbul, (inv. 487, illustrated in The 1400th Anniversary of the Qur'an, exhibition catalogue, Turkey, 2010, cat.56, pp. 252-53). Looking closely at the signature of 'Abdallah Sayrafi it contains a typical feature of his calligraphy, in that the letters 'dal' and subsequent 'alef' in 'Abdallah appear to be connected. This was confirmed as part of the personal style of calligraphy of Sayrafi by Abolala Soudavar in his studies of the 'Abu-sa'idnama, and through this has published a further comparable signature of 'Abdullah Sayrafi also with these letters joined,( illustrated in Abolala Soudavar, 'The Saga of Abu-Sa'id Bahador Khan. The Abu Sa'idnama,' in Julian Raby and Theresa Fitzherbert ed., The Court of the Il-Khans, 1290 -1340, Oxford Studies in Islamic Art 12, Oxford 1996, p. 95-218). A further feature of the signature is the form of the 'fah-ya' at the end of Sayrafi. These last two letters are written above the beginning part of the word, with noticeably a wide curved 'ya' the terminal of which curves underneath and extends horizontally towards the right-hand margin. An almost identical form of these last two letters is mirrored on a signature by Sayrafi on a calligraphic panel in the Khalili collection (inv. CAL.25; Nabil Safwat, The Art of the Pen, The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol. V, Oxford, 1996, no.42, p. 76).
The master calligrapher 'Abdallah Sayrafi was a native of the Ilkhanid capital Tabriz. According to both chroniclers Qadi Ahmad and Dust Muhammad, 'Abdallah Sayrafi was responsible for the calligraphic designs on numerous monumental architectural tiles in the city of Tabriz. These included several commissions from the local Chubanid dynasty for tiles to decorate buildings including the Dimashqiyya Madrassa and a building dedicated to the Ilkhanid ruler Sulayman ibn Yusufshah known as the 'Ala'iyya or the Sulaymaniyya. The earliest known work by 'Abdullah Sayrafi to survive is an album page dated AH 710/1310-11 AD held in the Topkapi (inv. B411, folio 70b.) and the latest work is a Qur'an manuscript in the Turk ve Islam Eserleri Muzesi (TIEM), also in Istanbul, dated AH 744/1343-44 AD. This places our panel approximately in the middle of 'Abdullah Sayrafi's known period of work, (Sheila S. Blair, Islamic Calligraphy, Edinburgh, 2008, p. 298)
The repeated elongation of the letters ba and kaf in the present panel indicates Sayrafi's familiarity with designing contemporary Ilkhanid architectural inscriptions, (Sheila S. Blair, op. Cit., p. 257).
The two first lines of this panel share almost exactly the same forms of 'lam-alef' and also the rounded vowel points as a copy of the Qur'an also signed by 'Abdullah Sayrafi in the Turk ve Islam Eserleri Muzesi (TIEM), in Istanbul, (inv. 487, illustrated in The 1400th Anniversary of the Qur'an, exhibition catalogue, Turkey, 2010, cat.56, pp. 252-53). Looking closely at the signature of 'Abdallah Sayrafi it contains a typical feature of his calligraphy, in that the letters 'dal' and subsequent 'alef' in 'Abdallah appear to be connected. This was confirmed as part of the personal style of calligraphy of Sayrafi by Abolala Soudavar in his studies of the 'Abu-sa'idnama, and through this has published a further comparable signature of 'Abdullah Sayrafi also with these letters joined,( illustrated in Abolala Soudavar, 'The Saga of Abu-Sa'id Bahador Khan. The Abu Sa'idnama,' in Julian Raby and Theresa Fitzherbert ed., The Court of the Il-Khans, 1290 -1340, Oxford Studies in Islamic Art 12, Oxford 1996, p. 95-218). A further feature of the signature is the form of the 'fah-ya' at the end of Sayrafi. These last two letters are written above the beginning part of the word, with noticeably a wide curved 'ya' the terminal of which curves underneath and extends horizontally towards the right-hand margin. An almost identical form of these last two letters is mirrored on a signature by Sayrafi on a calligraphic panel in the Khalili collection (inv. CAL.25; Nabil Safwat, The Art of the Pen, The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art, vol. V, Oxford, 1996, no.42, p. 76).