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Lot Essay
The Shahnama from which this painting comes was sold at Sotheby's 22 April 1980, lot 271. The colophon named the scribe as Qutb al-Din ibn Hasan al-Tuni and gave the date as 20 Shawwal AH 988 (22 November 1580 AD). The catalogue notes that there were twenty-four miniatures in the manuscript at that time, attributed to four different artists, of whom the best, artist A, was responsible for the present painting.
Two of the best paintings from this manuscript, attributed to the same artist, were exhibited in Cambridge in 2010 (Barbara Brend and Charles Melville, Epic of the Persian Kings, the Art of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, London and New York, 2010, nos.68 and 69, pp.172-175; also https://www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/gallery/shahnameh/vgallery/section4.htm l). These show painter A at his best, with a dynamism and exuberance that is as strong as in any Safavid painting. They positively burst out of their margins, just retaining two small panels of text at top and bottom. The Sotheby's catalogue notes the strength of the rocks in painter A's work as being one of his strongest features. These are shown very well here, massing up above the cave where the two prophets sit, their haloes applied with such thick gold that they literally appear to illuminate the space.
This filling of the painting with rocks is a feature of royal manuscripts of the period. One can see it in a number of paintings in the Shah Isma'il II Shahnama, but it is considerably more marked in some of the paintings in the Haft Awrang created for Sultan Ibrahim Mirza (Marianna Shreve Simpson, Sultan Ibrahim Mirza's Haft Awrang, Washington D.C., 1997, for example f.105a, p.124). The clouds that our artist uses in other paintings, for example in the depiction of Bahram Gur slaying lions already noted, are like greatly enlarged versions of the clouds that sometimes appear above the main scene within the upper margin in other manuscripts made for Sultan Ibrahim Mirza. For instance, "A Prince visits a Hermit" from the Subhat al-Abrar of Jami now in the Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon (Simpson, op.cit, fig.99, p.154). The copy of the Shahnama that our painting was prepared for was commissioned on a large scale; it was certainly an important commission. Our artist was certainly heavily influenced by the school of painting working under Sultan Ibrahim Mirza, and what may lack in the refinement of detail in his paintings he makes up for in remarkable strength and vitality.
Other leaves from the same dispersed manuscript appeared at Sotheby's London, 9th April 2014, lot 82; and in these Rooms, 10th October 2013, lots 76 and 77. Two folios were exhibited at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, in 2007 (The Arts of the Muslim Knight. The Furusiyya Art Foundation Collection, Milan 2008) (the paintings were not published in the catalogue). Two other folios are in the Sarikhani Collection, UK.