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Lot Essay
This enthralling drawing belongs to one of the most fascinating groups of works in the history of Islamic painting. These works, commonly gathered under the label Siyah Qalam (‘Black Pen’) drawings, have in common a striking aspect, a strong individual quality, a mysterious iconography and a much debated origin. Most of them are contained in four albums in the Library of the Topkapi Palace Museum (Hazine 2152, 2153, 2154 and 2160) and only a very small number of works are in public and private collections outside Turkey.
In his foreword to the 1981 seminal publication on the subject, Ernst Grube writes that ‘[these] paintings and drawings have few, if any, parallels anywhere in the world’. (Ernst J. Grube, Eleanor G. Sims and John Carswell (eds.), Islamic Art, An Annual Dedicated to the Art and Culture of the Muslim World, Vol. I, New York, 1981, xi). Grube discusses in ‘The Problem of the Istanbul Album Paintings’ ‘their peculiar stylistic qualities, their often strange and unusual subject matter, the fact that they do not correspond to anything known from the well-established ateliers of the 14th and 15th centuries and the fact that many [such as ours] are inscribed with the name of an artist – Ustad Muhammad Siyah Qalam’. For these reasons, ‘they have fascinated scholars’ (Grube, Sims and Carswell (eds.) 1981, p.1).
Grube identifies three distinct groups within the Istanbul albums: The ‘Siyah Qalam’ Paintings (Group I), The ‘Chinese Style’ Paintings (Group II) and ‘Paintings of Mixed Conventions’ (Group III). All paintings have been created as independent, single works and do not illustrate a text. Although many are cut up and pasted onto different album pages, they seem to form scroll-like compositions clearly influenced by Chinese scroll painting and by story-telling traditions. Our Demon clearly belongs to Group I which mostly depicts figures of ‘Nomads’, ‘Darvishes’, ‘Shamans’ and ‘Monsters’ and are very probably the earliest of all and from which the others develop. They are ‘painted in heavily applied, sombre colours [..], with occasional red, black, and gold. The curious manner in which the folds of garments, and the heavy lines of the highly expressive faces are rendered; the fact that [there is mostly no] indication of locale, no landscape or background detail, the figures being set against the plain greyish colour of the coarse, unpolished paper on which they are painted; [..] make them recognizable as the work, if not of a single painter, certainly of a painter and his close collaborators in an atelier. These paintings are [..] frequently inscribed with the name, Muhammad Siyah Qalam’ (Grube, Sims and Carswell (eds.) 1981, p.2). Whilst our Demon belongs to the smaller paintings of the group, it displays all these characteristics as seen on six other pages from Album H. 2153 (Grube, Sims and Carswell (eds.) 1981, fig.244-249). These demons have powerful and oversized hands and feet, frightful faces emerging from concentric fleshy folds from which shine gold fangs and bulging eyes, topped with curving horns, their body covered in thick hair, only wearing voluminous draped skirts gathered at the waist and gold bangles. The piece of cloth that he holds is a recurring motif in the drawings, see for instance the two dancing monsters, each holding two cloths on H.2153, f. 34v (Grube, Sims and Carswell (eds.) 1981, fig.304 and J.M Rogers (ed.), The Topkapi Saray Museum Manuscripts, Istanbul, 1986, figs.84, 86 and 87).
The simple, coarse-grained paper used for these drawings, the independence from written text, the absence of courtly scenes suggest that they were executed outside the Islamic manuscript tradition. The excessive wear and tear of the paper may also indicate that they were associated to story-telling and the recital of folk legends (Turks, 2005, p.155). It is on this type of paper that ‘we find the most interesting pictures [of the Istanbul Albums] (Zeren Tanindi, ‘Some Problems of Two Istanbul Albums, H.2153 and 2160’, in Grube, 1981, p.37) and they ‘must be the earliest surviving examples in the Turkic world of pictures made for display during the recitals of stories (Turks, 2005, p.155).
A surface examination of the paper shows that it was produced with ‘floating mould’ method, a technique particular to Tibet and Nepal. The plant used in the Siyah Qalam paper originates in Northern and Western China and although this ‘does not mean that the paintings were also made there, it does throw some light on the origins of the paintings; in Transoxiana, Khurasan and Iran paper was imported from points further east’ (Turks, 2005, p.151). Some drawings show a preliminary sketch executed in red.
The origin of these paintings have been much discussed and opinions have widely differed. In the early 20th century, the Siyah Qalam drawings were suggested to have come from the Golden Horde Territory. Later, it was suggested that they originated in a Mongol atelier active in Central Asia or that some of them came from Yuan or Ming China. Grube quotes more recent studies suggesting Timurid ateliers in Herat and Samarqand, whilst Turkish scholars suggested in the 1950s that they originated at the court of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror. An Eastern Anatolian origin was suggested in the 1970s but later linked to Western Iran and the influence of Jalayrid painting. Another attribution, supported by Stchoukine in 1935, was that these were the work of Turkestan artists active in the mid-16th century and it is this suggestion that retains Grube’s favour (Grube, 2005, p.11). The 2005 Turks exhibition at the Royal Academy, London suggests an attribution to Central Asia and date Group I of the drawings to the 14th century. This is the attribution we retain in this discussion.
Whilst we chose to call the present figure a ‘demon’, its exact identification is complex. These figures have been called ‘Shamans’, ‘Darvishes’, ‘Bakhshis’, ‘Divs’ and ‘Monsters’. According to Esin (‘Muhammad Siyah Qalam and the Inner Asian Turkish Tradition’ in Islamic Art, 1981, p.97), they are closest to the Uighur yeks, a ‘glutton’, with human body, animal head and princely ornaments, often with bovine or cervine horns. Here, the demon appears to dance, his left leg highly raised above the ground, his two arms raised, his body distorted. It strongly recalls ‘The Dance of the Black Shamans’ where two figures adopt a similar stance (Grube, 2005, fig.304). Esin suggests that the drawings could be illustrations of sacrifices made to the ‘glutton yek’ but that they denote a ‘heterogeneous culture’ which includes Islamic demonology. Whilst many figures in the group can be paralleled with Chinese originals and are under Central Asian influence, our drawing, as others in the groups, shows the influence of Persian painting. By the 14th and 15th century, demons are relatively common figures in the Islamic imagery, playing a part in epics such as the Shahnama or in works dealing with Wonders of the Creation, astrology, etc. A late 14th century Jalayrid manuscript of the Kitab al-Bulhan in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and an Egyptian copy of the Kitab al-Mawalid, dated 1300 and attributed to Cairo, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Arabe 2583) both display large figures of demons with grotesque, yet human features and with bovine or caprine horns either as a single figure or in assembly. Fol.30r of the Bodleian manuscript depicts a three-headed demon, whilst f.3r of the BNF manuscript depicts a four-headed demon, both offering precedents for our figure which, although unclearly, appears to be two-headed (Grube, 1981, fig.241).
Although the attribution to Muhammad Siyah Qalam appears on over sixty of these drawings, alongside others to various artists including Shaykhi, the variety of style and levels of quality suggests that it is not the work of a single artist – however this is debated by B.W. Robinson in ‘Siyah Qalam’, Grube, 1981, p.62. Unfortunately little is known about him but Robinson tentatively suggests that he might be Darwish Muhammad, a painter at the court of the Aq Qoyunlu Turkman ruler, Yaqub Bey (r. 1478-90); a supposition Ivanov stresses ‘is very interesting but remains to be demonstrated’ (A.A. Ivanov, Some Observations on the Miniatures of Muhammad Siyah Qalam’, in Grube, 1981, p.67). Darvish Muhammad worked on Yaqub Bey’s masterpiece, a copy of the Khamsa of Nizami achieved in Tabriz in 1481 (Istanbul, TKS, H762.) However Robinson acknowledges that the artist has also been associated with the reign of Timur. The sixty or so written attributions to the artist (written with no regard for the orientation of the pictures) have been linked to the hand of Sultan Ahmed I, as seen on the two albums H.2153 an 2160 as the Sultan ‘looked at the album from time to time’ (Tanindi, ibid, p.38). Grube identifies two distinct styles within Group I: the first group executed by a master and the second ‘executed in the same manner, but the figures represented are generally smaller in scale and there are more of them in each composition’ (Grube, 1981, p.5). Our drawing clearly belongs to the smaller group and may well have been cut out from a larger composition. The fact that the attribution to Muhammad Siyah Qalam in the top left corner is trimmed suggests exactly this.
The present drawing may have been acquired in Istanbul in the late 18th century. The compilation of the Diez Albums, now in Berlin, which contain similar material shows how paintings from the imperial collection were sold to collectors at the time. Heinrich Friedrich Diez, the Prussian Charge d’Affaires to Istanbul in the late 1780s, bought there numerous works on paper which were to form the basis for his albums. In his work Denkwurdigkeiten von Asien (1813-15), he recalls how he was granted access to the material given by the sultan over to the harem and had the opportunity to choose from it and buy the works dispersed as a successor came to the throne (David J. Roxburg, ‘Heinrich Friedrich von Diez and His Eponymous Albums: Mss. Diez a. Fols. 70-74’, in Muqarnas, 1995, pp.112-136).
Three other paintings in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, probably belonged to the Topkapi albums (57.51.24; 68.175; 68.48). Others are in the Freer Gallery of Art (37.25 and 38.14), the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (14.545 and 14.542), the Los Angeles Museum County Museum for Art (M.73.5.587), Kansas City (43-6/2), the Louvre, Paris (Or. 7093), the Marquis de Ganay private collection, and two were formerly in the Anet and Vigner Collections.
In his foreword to the 1981 seminal publication on the subject, Ernst Grube writes that ‘[these] paintings and drawings have few, if any, parallels anywhere in the world’. (Ernst J. Grube, Eleanor G. Sims and John Carswell (eds.), Islamic Art, An Annual Dedicated to the Art and Culture of the Muslim World, Vol. I, New York, 1981, xi). Grube discusses in ‘The Problem of the Istanbul Album Paintings’ ‘their peculiar stylistic qualities, their often strange and unusual subject matter, the fact that they do not correspond to anything known from the well-established ateliers of the 14th and 15th centuries and the fact that many [such as ours] are inscribed with the name of an artist – Ustad Muhammad Siyah Qalam’. For these reasons, ‘they have fascinated scholars’ (Grube, Sims and Carswell (eds.) 1981, p.1).
Grube identifies three distinct groups within the Istanbul albums: The ‘Siyah Qalam’ Paintings (Group I), The ‘Chinese Style’ Paintings (Group II) and ‘Paintings of Mixed Conventions’ (Group III). All paintings have been created as independent, single works and do not illustrate a text. Although many are cut up and pasted onto different album pages, they seem to form scroll-like compositions clearly influenced by Chinese scroll painting and by story-telling traditions. Our Demon clearly belongs to Group I which mostly depicts figures of ‘Nomads’, ‘Darvishes’, ‘Shamans’ and ‘Monsters’ and are very probably the earliest of all and from which the others develop. They are ‘painted in heavily applied, sombre colours [..], with occasional red, black, and gold. The curious manner in which the folds of garments, and the heavy lines of the highly expressive faces are rendered; the fact that [there is mostly no] indication of locale, no landscape or background detail, the figures being set against the plain greyish colour of the coarse, unpolished paper on which they are painted; [..] make them recognizable as the work, if not of a single painter, certainly of a painter and his close collaborators in an atelier. These paintings are [..] frequently inscribed with the name, Muhammad Siyah Qalam’ (Grube, Sims and Carswell (eds.) 1981, p.2). Whilst our Demon belongs to the smaller paintings of the group, it displays all these characteristics as seen on six other pages from Album H. 2153 (Grube, Sims and Carswell (eds.) 1981, fig.244-249). These demons have powerful and oversized hands and feet, frightful faces emerging from concentric fleshy folds from which shine gold fangs and bulging eyes, topped with curving horns, their body covered in thick hair, only wearing voluminous draped skirts gathered at the waist and gold bangles. The piece of cloth that he holds is a recurring motif in the drawings, see for instance the two dancing monsters, each holding two cloths on H.2153, f. 34v (Grube, Sims and Carswell (eds.) 1981, fig.304 and J.M Rogers (ed.), The Topkapi Saray Museum Manuscripts, Istanbul, 1986, figs.84, 86 and 87).
The simple, coarse-grained paper used for these drawings, the independence from written text, the absence of courtly scenes suggest that they were executed outside the Islamic manuscript tradition. The excessive wear and tear of the paper may also indicate that they were associated to story-telling and the recital of folk legends (Turks, 2005, p.155). It is on this type of paper that ‘we find the most interesting pictures [of the Istanbul Albums] (Zeren Tanindi, ‘Some Problems of Two Istanbul Albums, H.2153 and 2160’, in Grube, 1981, p.37) and they ‘must be the earliest surviving examples in the Turkic world of pictures made for display during the recitals of stories (Turks, 2005, p.155).
A surface examination of the paper shows that it was produced with ‘floating mould’ method, a technique particular to Tibet and Nepal. The plant used in the Siyah Qalam paper originates in Northern and Western China and although this ‘does not mean that the paintings were also made there, it does throw some light on the origins of the paintings; in Transoxiana, Khurasan and Iran paper was imported from points further east’ (Turks, 2005, p.151). Some drawings show a preliminary sketch executed in red.
The origin of these paintings have been much discussed and opinions have widely differed. In the early 20th century, the Siyah Qalam drawings were suggested to have come from the Golden Horde Territory. Later, it was suggested that they originated in a Mongol atelier active in Central Asia or that some of them came from Yuan or Ming China. Grube quotes more recent studies suggesting Timurid ateliers in Herat and Samarqand, whilst Turkish scholars suggested in the 1950s that they originated at the court of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror. An Eastern Anatolian origin was suggested in the 1970s but later linked to Western Iran and the influence of Jalayrid painting. Another attribution, supported by Stchoukine in 1935, was that these were the work of Turkestan artists active in the mid-16th century and it is this suggestion that retains Grube’s favour (Grube, 2005, p.11). The 2005 Turks exhibition at the Royal Academy, London suggests an attribution to Central Asia and date Group I of the drawings to the 14th century. This is the attribution we retain in this discussion.
Whilst we chose to call the present figure a ‘demon’, its exact identification is complex. These figures have been called ‘Shamans’, ‘Darvishes’, ‘Bakhshis’, ‘Divs’ and ‘Monsters’. According to Esin (‘Muhammad Siyah Qalam and the Inner Asian Turkish Tradition’ in Islamic Art, 1981, p.97), they are closest to the Uighur yeks, a ‘glutton’, with human body, animal head and princely ornaments, often with bovine or cervine horns. Here, the demon appears to dance, his left leg highly raised above the ground, his two arms raised, his body distorted. It strongly recalls ‘The Dance of the Black Shamans’ where two figures adopt a similar stance (Grube, 2005, fig.304). Esin suggests that the drawings could be illustrations of sacrifices made to the ‘glutton yek’ but that they denote a ‘heterogeneous culture’ which includes Islamic demonology. Whilst many figures in the group can be paralleled with Chinese originals and are under Central Asian influence, our drawing, as others in the groups, shows the influence of Persian painting. By the 14th and 15th century, demons are relatively common figures in the Islamic imagery, playing a part in epics such as the Shahnama or in works dealing with Wonders of the Creation, astrology, etc. A late 14th century Jalayrid manuscript of the Kitab al-Bulhan in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and an Egyptian copy of the Kitab al-Mawalid, dated 1300 and attributed to Cairo, in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (Arabe 2583) both display large figures of demons with grotesque, yet human features and with bovine or caprine horns either as a single figure or in assembly. Fol.30r of the Bodleian manuscript depicts a three-headed demon, whilst f.3r of the BNF manuscript depicts a four-headed demon, both offering precedents for our figure which, although unclearly, appears to be two-headed (Grube, 1981, fig.241).
Although the attribution to Muhammad Siyah Qalam appears on over sixty of these drawings, alongside others to various artists including Shaykhi, the variety of style and levels of quality suggests that it is not the work of a single artist – however this is debated by B.W. Robinson in ‘Siyah Qalam’, Grube, 1981, p.62. Unfortunately little is known about him but Robinson tentatively suggests that he might be Darwish Muhammad, a painter at the court of the Aq Qoyunlu Turkman ruler, Yaqub Bey (r. 1478-90); a supposition Ivanov stresses ‘is very interesting but remains to be demonstrated’ (A.A. Ivanov, Some Observations on the Miniatures of Muhammad Siyah Qalam’, in Grube, 1981, p.67). Darvish Muhammad worked on Yaqub Bey’s masterpiece, a copy of the Khamsa of Nizami achieved in Tabriz in 1481 (Istanbul, TKS, H762.) However Robinson acknowledges that the artist has also been associated with the reign of Timur. The sixty or so written attributions to the artist (written with no regard for the orientation of the pictures) have been linked to the hand of Sultan Ahmed I, as seen on the two albums H.2153 an 2160 as the Sultan ‘looked at the album from time to time’ (Tanindi, ibid, p.38). Grube identifies two distinct styles within Group I: the first group executed by a master and the second ‘executed in the same manner, but the figures represented are generally smaller in scale and there are more of them in each composition’ (Grube, 1981, p.5). Our drawing clearly belongs to the smaller group and may well have been cut out from a larger composition. The fact that the attribution to Muhammad Siyah Qalam in the top left corner is trimmed suggests exactly this.
The present drawing may have been acquired in Istanbul in the late 18th century. The compilation of the Diez Albums, now in Berlin, which contain similar material shows how paintings from the imperial collection were sold to collectors at the time. Heinrich Friedrich Diez, the Prussian Charge d’Affaires to Istanbul in the late 1780s, bought there numerous works on paper which were to form the basis for his albums. In his work Denkwurdigkeiten von Asien (1813-15), he recalls how he was granted access to the material given by the sultan over to the harem and had the opportunity to choose from it and buy the works dispersed as a successor came to the throne (David J. Roxburg, ‘Heinrich Friedrich von Diez and His Eponymous Albums: Mss. Diez a. Fols. 70-74’, in Muqarnas, 1995, pp.112-136).
Three other paintings in the Metropolitan Museum, New York, probably belonged to the Topkapi albums (57.51.24; 68.175; 68.48). Others are in the Freer Gallery of Art (37.25 and 38.14), the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (14.545 and 14.542), the Los Angeles Museum County Museum for Art (M.73.5.587), Kansas City (43-6/2), the Louvre, Paris (Or. 7093), the Marquis de Ganay private collection, and two were formerly in the Anet and Vigner Collections.