DAVID J. ROXBURGH

THE STUDY OF PAINTING AND THE ARTS OF THE BOOK

The essays in this volume are revised versions of pa-pers first presented at the conference, "The Makingand Reception of Painting in the Pre-Modern IslamicWorld," held in May 1999 under the auspices of theAga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at HarvardUniversity. Over two days, the speakers presented newresearch on various topics about painting and the artsof the book in the pre-modern Islamic world. Despitethe breadth suggested by the conference's title, themajority of papers reflect a critical mass of scholar-ship that has grown up around painting and the artsof the book in Iran, Central Asia, and the Middle East,and within a literary milieu that was predominantlyPersian, in the so-called classical period of Persianpainting, spanning the fourteenth through the six-teenth century. Some of the essays dealt with earlierperiods or expanded the geographical boundaries tooffer perspectives on the art tradition in its formationand in its later reception as a cultural construct.

The division of this volume's essays into four cate-gories reflects the organization of the conference.l Asdefined at the conference's inception, the categoriesencompass, first, the materials and methods used forbook production; second, the conception and reali-zation of painting; third, theories of painting and aes-thetics; and fourth, later responses to paintings andbooks. By providing a thematic framework, these cat-egories allowed a critical discussion of the physical andwritten sources that extended beyond the specifics ofindividual papers to question methods used to studymanuscript painting and generally accepted scholarlyparadigms and the foundations of arguments. Thecritical insights of the four discussants-Yves Porter,Marianna Shreve Simpson, Irene Winter, and GfilruNecipoglu-greatly added to the debate.

From its formative stages, Persian painting in bothmanuscripts and single-sheet images quickly emergedas a principal subject of scholarly interest, alongsidethe equally developed categories of architecture, ce-ramics, and carpets. Significant space was allocated

to painting and the arts of the book in the first exhi-bitions of this century; indeed, some of them displayedpainting to the exclusion of all other arts.2 But it hasbeen quite a long time since a conference was devotedexclusively to painting and the arts of the book, andthis requires some comment.

Changes in the scholarship on Islamic art and ar-chitecture, as well as in pedagogy, have been reflectedin the conferences of recent years. A few-for exam-ple, a recent conference on the exhibition and col-lection of Islamic art, 3 and another about pre-mod-ern Islamic palaces 4 -were organized along thematiclines. Conferences on the art and architecture of theTimurids (Toronto and Washington, D.C., 1989);5Mongols (Oxford, 1995);6 Safavids (London, 1998);7

and Fatimids (Paris, 1998)8 were framed regionally,presented under a dynastic rubric, and embraced awide range of media from portable objects to immo-bile buildings and in varying degrees involved a meas-ure of interdisciplinary effort-historians of art werejoined by historians and philologists. Regionally de-fined and chronologically limited approaches permit-ted a more complex analysis of the blanket term, Is-lamic art and architecture, and offered nuanced char-acterizations of a culture in a given time and placeby avoiding those reductive Orientalist formulationsthat have plagued the field. A particularized portrayalof Islamic art and architecture was sought through itssynchronic setting.

Most of these conferences, whether regional or the-matic, responded to broader intellectual currents inthe humanities by giving weight to contextual analy-sis along cultural, political, social and economic lines.When appropriate, the arts of painting and the bookwere accorded a prominent role, but they ultimatelywere lost in the wider interpretation of cultural pa-tronage as a politically motivated, programmatic ac-tivity. Although it is true that buildings and objectscan possess the power to embody ideologies andthereby to give a hegemonic group's prerogatives some

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physical shape and that contemporary groups wereconscious of this and chose to exploit it, the domi-nant paradigm and its methodological formula alwaysanticipated the end result. Historical materials weresimply set into a readymade framework. The place ofpainting and the arts of the book in this culturalproject and its scholarly formulations remained un-clear, however, despite the fact that some illustratedtexts clearly deal with topics of legitimacy, 9 even if theireffect would have been constrained by a book's lim-ited audience. Formal and stylistic connections be-tween media were explained by the presence of thecourt-sponsored workshop as a site where visual idi-oms associated with a hegemonic group were codifiedand disseminated. Hence, although painting and thebook were an important part of what constituted "cul-ture" in a specific time and place, a book's role as apolitical tool demanded tempering despite the factthat its broadly generative aesthetic dimension couldbe retained.

These intellectual gatherings and the accompany-ing publications that followed produced some signifi-cant and fruitful results. They redefined corpuses ofobjects, expanded the pool of sources used by histo-rians of art, and together established a new base linefor the training of young scholars. However, they werealso marked by a tendency to bracket off image fromobject and from context.10 Connections between ob-jects and contexts are useful, except for the problemthat the historian wants the object simultaneously toreflect its historical context, to be produced by it, andto be read synoptically as a gateway to it. The objectreflects, but it can have no agency-it is inescapablyof and in its time rather than something that shapesit.11 Ironically, the object often becomes a decoy, withthe study of its physical features and properties, itsmateriality, put aside. What it "means" is emphasizedover "how it might mean." The object is decoded andinterpreted, though the mechanisms of the responsethat the object produces are not. Is it possible nowto unite these elements-image, object, context-andreturn to issues that have been largely neglected?

In the past twenty years or so, the study of paint-ing in the pre-modern Islamic world has yielded someproductive developments along three lines: 12 theholistic study of the book as an object; artist's mate-rials, techniques, and practices; and the visual prop-erties and functional aspects of painting. These threelines formed the starting point for conceptualizing theconference with the hope that the potential of such

methods of analysis and directions of thought couldbe charted, and then pursued and further expanded.

The first development is the close examination ofthe book as an object-basically the study of its physicalelements and processes of production-using codico-logical methods. Interest in the book's constituentparts was first manifest in the 1979 publication, Artsof the Book in Central Asia: 14th-16th Centuries, editedby Basil Gray. 3 Although it emphasized painting, itsopening chapters covered the rarely treated subjectsof calligraphy, illumination, and binding. Numerousvolumes on manuscript bindings and bibliopegy fol-lowed.1 4 Collections of essays and-journals dealingexclusively with the diverse aspects of bookmaking 5

and monographic studies of illustrated manuscriptsheavily weighted toward their production16 have alsobeen published. Recent catalogues of manuscriptcollections also reflect a higher standard of documen-tation.' 7 The cumulative effect of these new perspec-tives on the book has been startling; the applicationof codicology forced scholars to acknowledge thepotentially complex history of the book as an artifactin the period of its formation and/or subsequent re-formation at later times, and hence challenged modelsof production (centered on the kitdbkhana, generallyunderstood as library-cum-workshop)'8 and the under-pinnings of what is vaguely referred to as patronage.Most of these challenges await further study.

An unremitting focus on the book, as a portable,self-contained site for reading and seeing also de-manded reassessments of the place of painting in it.One immediately obvious line of scholarly pursuit wasthe relationship between word and image,'9 perhapsmotivated by developments in the study of Westernmedieval illuminated manuscripts. This new tack wasprobably a reaction to the purely visual response topaintings by generations of scholars who were unableto read the painting's relevant text, or had no inter-est in it; they were satisfied with translating its cap-tion in a rubric panel or locating a practitioner's sig-nature. The emphasis on the illustrative function ofpaintings in books led to word-and-image studies thatexplored the development of pictorial cycles forcommonly illustrated texts and the iconographic for-mulas used to portray individual players and stockcharacters.2 0 After gauging changes in the handlingof individual subjects and differences between the il-lustrative cycles or sequences of separate manuscripts,some illustrated books were singled out for theiranomalous nature and explained as manipulations

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INTRODUCTION

designed to satisfy particular ideological goals. A goodexample is the great Mongol Shahnama of Firdawsi(dated to ca. 1328-36), whose illustrative cycle hasbeen interpreted as a reflection of contemporaryIlkhanid concerns (e.g., legitimacy, the fantastic or su-pernatural, death and mourning, the role of women). 21

Although these first steps were critical, less literal ex-plorations of word and image relationships remain tobe undertaken. For example, one can imagine a morethoroughgoing analysis of relationships between wordand image that would examine the historical validityin modern scholarship of an optical- or retinal-baseddiscursive mode, or the perception and articulationof visual experiences through the rhetorical frame-works of textual genres and patterns of speech. 22

The second line of inquiry emphasized the artist'smaterials, techniques, and practices.2 3 By reconsider-ing the role of the maker-painter, calligrapher, il-luminator, and binder among others-now under-stood as a repository of technical expertise and tra-dition, general notions of patron-artist relationshipsand stylistic taxonomies were called into question.Since the inception of the study of painting in the earlytwentieth century, historical sequences have been struc-tured around a core group of enlightened patrons,e.g., Sultan AhmadJalayir, Baysunghur, Sultan Husayn,Shah Tahmasp, and Shah 'Abbas, based in particularmetropolitan centers (Herat, Tabriz, Shiraz, Istanbul,Bukhara), 2 4 to construct a dynastic model that wouldproduce an artist who would fully emerge in the latefifteenth century as someone who could create mean-ing. As in most fields in the history of art, paintingsand the arts of the book were first sorted into groupsthrough stylistic analysis and methods of connoisseur-ship.

While it would be inappropriate today to criticizethis method of analysis for its shortcomings, to con-tinue it in scholarship is more questionable, especiallywhen the stylistic method and its assumptions havegone unexamined. The methodological equation hasnot articulated, for example, the nature of the inter-relationship between style, place, period, and person.How it is that the practitioners of a metropolitancenter-e.g., Herat or Shiraz-can sustain a certainvisual look, a homogeneity, in spite of political changeand a community of practitioners that is constantlychanging. Was this look achieved through some formof visual censoring of productions in a particular placeusing some standard? If this were the case it wouldimply an internal arbitration of style and a pro-active

formation of an artistic canon that we have not ac-counted for. What about the role of the individual inrelation to the community of makers and the visualtradition associated with place? How is the space be-tween self and tradition negotiated? Taxonomy can-not sustain these questions because its paradigm ofproduction is founded upon the simplest of scenariosand admits the fewest of variables. Taxonomic analy-sis generally accords the artist the role of unthinkingmaker who is driven by reflex alone, a sleepwalker ofsorts.

When the taxonomic approach reached a criticalmass it became a self-sustaining project from whichscholars found it well nigh impossible to break free.A history of art existed above and beyond the historicalcontexts in which the art was made. Beyond contin-gency, art retained its autonomy. This history possessedits own rationale, incentives, and momentum. It wassupposed to tell the story of art through a history ofstylistic evolution achieved by gauging visual changesand differences between discrete works, and by mak-ing refinements and adjustments of chronology, prov-enance, and attribution in the face of an ever-expand-ing corpus of dated and undated objects.25 This frame-work could absorb previously unpublished materialsthat were found in libraries or that entered the mar-ketplace at auction. Historical data were adducedsolely to refine relationships between successive ob-

jects or between people and places through an ex-tremely limited use and literal reading of writtensources. 26 Individual patrons and artists retained theircentrality to underscore the art tradition's elite aura,and they represented values consonant with the so-cial and cultural aspirations of early collectors, deal-ers, and scholars. 2 7 A not so unfamiliar symmetry wasformed between the patron of refined taste and en-lightened aesthetic vision and the modern collector,a seductive contract between the present and the pastthat has played out over and again in the modern artmarket. In fact, the developing market and the growthof collecting were sustained by taxonomy.

The third, and certainly least developed, line ofrecent inquiry examines the visual properties2 8 andfunctional aspects of painting (mainly, but not exclu-sively, within the context of the book),29 to addressquestions related to audience (generally imagined asexclusive in its formation), the uses of images, andthe points of connection between the visual traditionand the wider culture. One can think, for example,of the connections suggested between painting and

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poetry, a conceptual and perceptual relationship be-tween word and image that was initially remarkedupon by Ehsan Yarshater and later developed by AdelAdamova, among others.3 0 But it is principally in theaspects of process and practice-the consequences ofbeing in and of a tradition-that filiations betweenthese two art forms most palpably emerge. Parallelstructures of training and performance yielded simi-lar results, suggesting continuities in practice andjudgment across media. The inter-media correspond-ences demonstrated by an array of objects on displayat the Timurid exhibition in 1988 implied a kind ofunified aesthetic in royally sponsored production, aphenomenon explained by the kitbkhna.

The implications of these concerns set a new coursefor art historical inquiry that went beyond taxonomy,moving painting out of its hermetic realm. But thereare three reasons why the study of painting and thearts of the book have maintained their highly special-ized and somewhat remote aura: methodology, theculture of the field, and resources. One problem thatthe students of painting of the pre-modern Islamicworld confront is of an ontological order that is in-herited as a methodological legacy. If one traces theprogress of the idea in print, one finds that it was firststated by Golombek, 3 1 then by Lowry and Nemazee, 3 2

and then followed up by Grabar.3 3 Each has broughtup the problem of the image's ontology in the con-text of the book: should it be approached as paint-ing or as illustration? Does the relevant text begin toexplain or to circumscribe the representation thataccompanies it? Sensitivity to early notions and sup-positions, perhaps realizable only through deephistoriographic analysis, helps to unveil the problemin this initial formulation.

Genuine and not so honorable concerns promotedPersianate painting as a rich and complex art tradi-tion. It, too, had its masters and its patrons, and theintricate pictorial structure and minute detail of thepainting seemed to encourage the separation of im-age from text and to legitimate the exhibition of paint-ings as single masterworks transferred from the hori-zontal viewing format of the book to the vertical gal-lery wall.34 Years later, when scholars became linguis-tically proficient, image and text were reunited. Butthe reunion does not mean that they pay adequateattention to the painting's visual devices and phenom-ena, and the tension between painting and illustra-tion remains.

A larger problem concerns the practices of histo-rians of art who decode meanings and their structures,and hermeneutics. Approaches to paintings in bookscame from those advanced in the study of the west-ern European pictorial tradition, and mainly througheasel painting (the exhibition of manuscript paintingson walls may have encouraged this approach,.foster-ing as it does the perception that manuscript paint-ing is visually no different from easel paintings, asidefrom miniaturization). But understanding images inbooks as paintings on sheets of paper requires a dif-ferent approach, perhaps, one that does not suppressthe fact that the painting is in the book.35

The last two aspects of book study-culture of thefield and resources-are easier to identify. The par-ticularities of the manuscript researcher's experiencemaintain and reinforce the distance between re-searcher and readership. The geographical spread ofobjects, institutional hierarchies and bureaucraticstructures, and the sheer cost of making even a frac-tion of a single manuscript's images available to a wideraudience, or of obtaining documentation for researchback home, place tight constraints on their study. Theprivate aspect of the research experience in libraries,and a close and personal connection to the object ofstudy, is often internalized through sets of privatelanguages. Scholars speak in the cataloguer's code ofletters and numbers; they rely on memory to summonup paintings seen in far-flung places, and thereexamination of paintings only brings further sur-prises, a testament to one aspect of the painting'spower.

No amount of verbal description or detailed pho-tographic documentation can approximate the expe-rience of holding a book and scrutinizing it, slowlytaking in its paintings unaided by optical devices suchas magnifying glasses (now in vogue at exhibitions),though the lens might succeed in establishing someapproximation of the intimate, total immersion cre-ated by study of paintings in books. We still need alingua franca for documenting and describing thefield's ever-expanding corpus of material,3 6 and we stillneed to increase our awareness in the subjects wechoose to explore, of the accumulated baggage of pastscholarship, and the various forces that have shapedthe discourse. The conference and the papers pub-lished here provide one occasion for discussion andperhaps will stimulate new debate.

4

INTRODUCTION

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Making a codex required the expertise of variouspractitioners working independently of each other ortogether as a group. Raw materials-paper, leather,pigments, inks, binding agents, starches-needed tobe procured and processed, often by painstaking andtime-consuming methods which required extensiveknowledge or skill. Implements-pens, brushes, sty-luses, knives, stamps, polishing stones-were crafted.Tricks of the trade-from cutting the reed to thick-ening ink-were learned and transmitted from teacherto pupil. The success of this transmission was argu-ably better accomplished by direct access to theteacher and his methods than by the highly mediateduse of a text through recipe books or treatises, manyof which have come down to us. 3 7

One treatise, Simi Nishapuri's Jawhar-i Sinmz (com-posed in 1433-34),38 imparts general advice on select-ing papers and tinting them, and fairly detailed in-structions for the production of pigments. Simi alsoexplains how to make ink and adduces two shortpoems as versified recipes "for quick memorization."He ends with general advice on thickening ink, shouldit be too thin. Much depended on developing an in-tuitive sense-like the proverbial cook imparting in-structions in the kitchen through unquantifiable ex-ample-from trial and error, for nothing could sup-plant knowledge accumulated through experience.While the versified recipes functioned as mnemonicdevices for remembering the relative proportions ofthe substances called for, their application by theincompetent would not necessarily produce a satisfac-tory result. Beyond the technical expertise requiredfor the ingredients' preparation, recipes are based onan abstract standard of elements and a purity of sub-stances.

At an earlier time, two calligraphers chided theeleventh-century master Ibn al-Bawwab (d. 1022) intheir commentaries on his qastzda (poem of at leastseven couplets in uniform meter), the R'iyyafi al-khatt("Ode on calligraphy"). Named for its rhyme in theletter r', in his qaszda Ibn al-Bawwab offered adviceon the formation of Arabic letters, the selection ofpaper and reed, the cutting of the reed, and the prepa-ration of ink.39 The commentators, Ibn al-Wahid andIbn al-Basis, understood the shortcomings of the poeticform for transmitting information on practices andprocedures and so they annotated Ibn al-Bawwab's tel-egraphic text with lengthy explanations. The commen-

tators express some of their frustration in doing this,noting how Ibn al-Bawwab had spoken "in generali-ties which served to conceal the details of his art."Their complaint is understandable. At the point whereIbn al-Bawwab turns to his explanation of how to cutthe point of the reed pen, he writes, "Do not ask meto reveal it; it is a secret to which I shall hold." Onegets the sense that he is holding back, not giving overall of his secrets, despite the poem's didactic prom-ise. Knowledge had its price and conditions, and somepractitioners were more willing than others to partcompany with their treasured secrets.

After the papers had been prepared and starched(knowingjust the right amount of starch to apply wascrucial if the pigment was to remain on the surface),and cut to nearly final size, the planning of text andimage placement, painting, ruling, and illuminationcould begin. The scribe could sit down to copy thetext after the sheets had been inscribed with the al-most invisible lines of the mastar (a board with cordsattached across it perpendicular to the vertical axis)that would serve to guide the pen. Painting and illu-mination could be drafted directly onto the sheet witha sharp point or an inked line, the graphic armatureguiding the application of pigments and gold. A hostof finishing processes-polishing the surface of thepainting, executing rulings around the textblock andbetween columns of text, and trimming, for example-would complete the pages. The pages would then begathered into a textblock, stitched together, andplaced in a binding. Most of these processes and tech-niques have been amply described in the literature.4 0

But other dimensions of materials and methodsremain to be considered and several of them are takenup in the essays byJonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair.Bloom studies evidence of early illustrated book pro-duction and attributes an increased rate in the twelfthcentury to the emergence and availability of paper.As a factor in the rise of the book, paper has beencuriously neglected. The shift from vellum and papyrusto paper had a significant impact not only on theformat and structure of the book but on the dissemi-nation of knowledge. The specific features and at-tributes-low porosity, durability, thinness, strength,and chemical stability-offered by paper made it aversatile medium and, at least theoretically, its low costmade it available (although some evidence suggeststhat in practice it was not always either cheap or avail-able). Bloom also examines the theory that there wasa coherent illustrated manuscript tradition prior to

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DAVID J. ROXBURGH

ca. 1150, and the purported role played by paper forthe design and execution of other media.

If we chart the use of paper over the period cov-ered by the essays in this volume, we see a shift froma relatively stable paper sheet-that is, a manuscriptcomposed of single sheets on which calligraphy, paint-ing, illumination, and rulings are executed-to a bookconceived as a patchwork of pieces, wherein the textpage may be framed by a margin of different paper.It is clear that the various aesthetic effects and possi-bilities of paper, and auxiliary treatments and tech-niques (stenciling, ink drawing, painting, washes, tint-ing, marbling), were fully explored and exploited,yielding the impression of an extraordinarily diverserepertoire within a fairly conservative technology.There is also the subject of pigment and ink to con-sider. Without wanting to be overly deterministic, isit possible to consider that the limitations and essen-tial properties of the pigments used may have contrib-uted to the aesthetic features of Persianate painting,for example, the avoidance of wash in favor of a hard-edged, enamel-like, opaque, radiant, and polychromesurface?

Sheila Blair brings us into a slightly later period,mainly the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Notingthe emphasis in scholarship on paintings to the com-parative neglect of the papers and auxiliary treatmentsused to enclose them (in fact, some manuscripts didnot even have any), Blair treats us to a seemingly infiniterange of examples especially of colored and decoratedpapers and charts changes throughout the period.

It is clear that technical ability and expertise werehighly prized because it is an oft-repeated subject inart historiographic literature, including prefaces toalbum collections, treatises, and references to prac-titioners in the biographical segments of chronicles.The aesthetic effect and longevity of the manuscriptdepended on technical knowledge. But might it bepossible to think about painting and the arts of thebook in such a way that the very legibility of techni-cal achievement in them would be addressed? Couldit be that a specific green and orange applied side byside on the paper signaled extraordinary competenceand ingenuity because of the danger of chemical in-stabilities generated by the adjacency of such colors?Perhaps it will only be possible to answer this kind ofquestion through the collaboration of conservationscientists and historians of art, a relatively new phe-nomenon in the field but one that is already yield-ing encouraging results.4 1

THE CONCEPTION AND REALIZATION OFPAINTING

The second group of papers centers on the concep-tion and realization of painting, a subject with innu-merable facets. A basic inquiry might begin with thevery act of combining text and image, of designingand producing a series of images for a specific textor a gathering of texts in an anthology or dzvan (po-etry collection).42 A consideration of the design pro-cess would involve an analysis of the technical meth-ods and materials used by artists to produce paintingsfor texts, from the design of individual componentsto their combination and arrangement in composi-tions. Would these paintings be narrative, diagram-matic, or emblematic,,or combinations thereof? Howwould the images illustrate the text-after all, sometexts lend themselves to narrative illustration moreeasily than others. Or would they just be there toaugment the book's value, to proclaim its status as aluxury object, and provide a pleasant respite from theact of reading? Certainly, paintings do not have a staticrelationship to their context in the book, just as theidea of the book as a material object changes over theperiod covered by the papers in this volume.

In imagining, conceptualizing, and then settling ona series of subjects, what resources would the design-ers turn to-the completed paintings in manuscriptsowned by a succession of royal, princely, or amiralpatrons that might define an illustrative program forthe text as a series of compositional prototypes? Loosepaper sheets inscribed with designs and perhaps car-ried by peripatetic artists seeking employment at dif-ferent courts? Or were paintings and designs bothdrawn upon? The techniques of pouncing used totransfer an image from one surface to another enabledthe reuse of finished and incomplete models alike.Finally, in what ways would the individual paintingsand the full aesthetic of the book-the totality of bind-ing, calligraphy, illumination, rulings, and decoratedpapers-go beyond the simple brief of copying a textand thereby transform the textual container into some-thing else?

But where did these processes occur? This thornyquestion, previously glossed over in the scholarship,has been the subject of recent debate. Islamic booksoften begin with a dedicatory protocol that mentionsthe institution of the kitabkhana /kutubkhna or thekhizdna al-kutub with the phrase bi-rasm-i, "by order of'

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INTRODUCTION

in an illuminated medallion (usually referred to as ashamsa).4` Too often, the meaning of this statement,which preceded the titles and name of the manu-script's original owner in the ex libris, was taken tosignify the existence of a physically fixed and well-funded place in which human and material resourcescould be gathered to produce manuscripts. But im-agine, for example, the challenge presented to schol-arly conceptions of production by some documentsbound into one of the Istanbul albums:

Petition from Shaykh-Muhammad, the least of Hismajesty's servants.I had a china inkpot with which I used to write. Twodays ago it was broken, and for this reason I am muchupset.It is besought that [His Majesty] grant in alms an inkpotwith which I may write and be engaged in constant prayerfor [His Majesty's] good fortune.44

or

The royal command [has been received] concerning thescribal activity of this humble slave of the court and hisapprentices [in which it is asked] how much each is ableto write in a day. The fact is that copying cannot becompared to other arts, for sometimes it happens that,without willing it to be so, one can accomplish manytimes what one expects, while other times, no matterhow much one presses oneself, not a fraction of whatone has accomplished in the past is possible. Appren-tices are as yet beginners: if they make haste in theirwriting it impedes their progress....45

How different would history look if it were particu-larized in response to these and other textual frag-ments?

The notion of the kitabkhdna as a fixed and perma-nent structure seems to be supported, or at least at-tested, by sparse textual records: the kitdbkMhna of theRab'-i Rashidi, endowed by the Ilkhanid vizier Rashidal-Din in the fourteenth century, is mentioned in thecomplex's endowment charter (waqfa.ma);46 the early-fifteenth-century Timurid workshop (kitdbkhdna) inHerat, presumably sponsored by Baysunghur, is men-tioned in what is basically a progress report, calledthe 'Arzaddsht;4 7 and a third document addressed tothe artist Bihzad, dated 24 April 1 522, that invites himto head the royal library (kitabhana-yi humayitn) spon-sored by the reigning Safavid Shah Isma'il and tooversee the works undertaken in it (kdrh-yi kitabkha-na).48 Implicit in most of the studies that deal withthe kitdbkhana is the notion that it was a royal institu-

tion generating designs and producing objects bycommission or speculatively for the court's consump-tion. Few studies have examined the production ofbooks beyond that framework.4 9

These three texts provide slightly different kinds ofinformation, namely, brief references to quality con-trol and the process of scribal copying; the range ofprojects underway in the kitdbkhdna at a given timeand their execution in different media and formats;and the variety of technical practices and forms ofcompetence overseen by one individual. But none ofthese written sources really gives us a clear idea of thespecifics of production. To determine that, our onlyrecourse is to look at the book itself. Marianna ShreveSimpson's analysis of the Haft Awrang of Jami spon-sored by the Safavid prince Ibrahim Mirza between1556 and 1565 amply demonstrated the permeabilityof the workshop and how such an institution couldbe called into existence for the final stages of a manu-script's production.5 0 Sections of the text were cop-ied by five calligraphers in three cities over severalyears.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Simpson'sstudy has to do with the workshop and the physicalsettings required for specific jobs; the copying of text,the execution of painting and illumination, the inscrip-tion of rulings, and the production of a protectivebinding. Some of these activities occurred in outly-ing locations, with separately assigned tasks carriedout by calligraphers in isolation, and then the manu-script's pieces were brought together for completion.Another line of inquiry, a form of ergonomics, couldexplore the physical requirements of spaces devotedto the production of books and its furniture and equip-ment. Hints offered by visual and written sources in-dicate a minimalist outcome. A famous page from theJahangir album (ca. 1600-10) depicts six artists at workin one of its visually stunning margins.51 In washes ofgold and opaque pigments, a papermaker is shownpolishing a single sheet, a bookbinder stamps the outercover of a binding, and a man smooths the outer edgesof a binding and textblock. The vignettes also includea calligrapher copying text, a man smelting gold, andanother man making a bookstand. The activities arestaged outdoors, the figures are seated, and they onlyuse minimal-and portable-furniture (low tables anddurable flat surfaces). Of the late fifteenth-century art-ist Mawlana Mirak Naqqash, the father and master ofBihzad, Mirza Muhammad Haydar Dughlat wrote:

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DAVID J. ROXBURGH

Although his execution is not up to Bizhad's, still allhis works were done outside in the open air, whetherhe was traveling, in attendance on the prince or at home;and he was never tied to a studio (hujra) or portfolio(kdghadhliq). This is strange enough but further yet hepracticed all kinds of sports.5 2

Although Mirza Muhammad Haydar's comment onthe strangeness of Mirak Naqqash's plein air workingmethod is somewhat ambiguous-does he refer to hisworking without designs, or his freedom from a stu-dio, or both?-the passage confirms the portability ofbookmaking techniques portrayed in the Mughal al-bum margin. As members of the courtly retinue, art-ists and calligraphers went with the court on campaignand on seasonal travel to choice summer and winterpasturage.

Of equal interest is the way in which we understandthe inner workings of the workshop, when and whereit existed, how orders or commissions were commu-nicated and articulated (if at all) between patron andpractitioner, the structures of the workforce and theimplications of collaborative production, the provisionof resources, both material and financial.53 It is usuallythe case that the patron's role is privileged in theseaesthetic deliberations, perhaps the result of the bi-ases of official historical sources that inevitably praisethe patron and that accord the practitioner a some-what undefined role. A good example is the Timuridprince Baysunghur (1397-1433): lauded in the con-temporary official sources, Baysunghur assumes mythicproportions in later historical and biographical ac-counts,5 4 but there is no firm evidence of his directinvolvement in decisions that culminated in his ex-traordinary library of poetic and didactic works. Rareare the studies that place emphasis on the practitioneras a repository of technique, tradition, and culturalmemory and that explore continuity through this seg-ment of society.

The essays in the second group deal with some ofthe following subjects:5 5 evidence for the earliest il-lustrated manuscripts in the Arabic tradition; thechanging relationship between image and text and therise of the single-sheet format for pictures freed fromthe book; the kinds of relationship between metro-politan and regional painting traditions; and the formof connections between text and image. What they alsodo, however, is examine different forces at work inproduction and their resulting paradigms. In her studyof early illustrated Arabic manuscripts, Eva Hoffmanreturns to the written and material sources to reas-

sess scholarly arguments and formulations. Althoughthere is considerable overlap with the materials pre-sented by Jonathan Bloom, she advances a differentinterpretation. In Hoffman's paper, the need for il-lustrations in books is studied as well as contexts ofproduction that fell beyond the royal gaze and spon-sorship.

The other papers are clustered together in the six-teenth century, particularly its middle and later dec-ades, a period generally accepted as one of extraor-dinary change throughout Persia. Abolala Soudavarfocuses on the artistic personality of Muhammadi andtraces his affiliations to royal courts and patrons.Against the backdrop of Shah Tahmasp's apparentdisinclination to support artists and the emergenceof other royal patrons, he examines the notion thatshifts in patronage in the late sixteenth century ulti-mately reshaped the landscape of production and ofpatronage. In the face of these changes, artists likeMuhammadi developed new modes of expression andexploited techniques and formats, the tinted drawingamong them.

Lale Ulu, in her study of book production in thesouthern Persian city of Shiraz, sifts through a massof sources and constructs a nuanced characterizationof what has been termed "commercial" production.Her study looks carefully at the formal and stylisticconnections between royal and non-royal manuscriptsand analyzes how these mechanisms operated throughthe transfer of books, models, artists, and patrons. Thecomplex underpinnings of bookmaking in Shiraz areuncovered through the interaction between courtlyand non-courtly figures. Uluc is also able to examinethe buying audience, a cadre of Ottoman and Safavidgrandees, suggesting the existence of interregionalmarkets.

THEORIES AND AESTHETICS OF PAINTING

One of the objectives of this third section was to ex-plore cultural views on painting and aesthetics. Inwhat ways did contemporary viewers understand thebook and the paintings that it contained? What sys-tems of value did they bring to it? This goal, fraughtwith all kinds of methodological problems, has so farbeen a non-starter in scholarship on Persianate paint-ing. Perhaps it is yet another casualty of the field'sinitial definition and its presuppositions. One or twoquotations may suffice to state the problem.

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Noting the coexistence of two visual modes, "real-ism" and "archaizing" in pictorial construction, in thework of the painter Bihzad, Binyon, Wilkinson andGray commented in their seminal work, Persian Mini-ature Painting, in 1933:

The discordance does not seem to have perturbed ei-ther the painters or their public. But they had no shareof the European feeling that a picture should conformas closely as possible to visual appearances; they hadnone of the zest in exploration which has made Euro-pean painting a voyage of discovery; they were contentto express themselves in an art without atmosphericeffect, without light and shade, an art which owed noth-ing to the study of anatomy or the study of perspective. 5 6

And later,

It must be admitted that Persian painting betrays nointellectual grasp of the structure of things. The Per-sian outlook is essentially and incurably romantic. Itenjoys what is marvellous, it is quite ready to believe theincredible. The painter stages his scene for his own andthe spectator's enjoyment, much as it might be arrangedin a theatre.57

If a theory of art could be formulated for Persianatepainting of the fourteenth through sixteenth centu-ries, it could be done only through a comparison withthe canon of Western European art. Binyon, Wilkin-son, and Gray privilege the Western form of image-referent relationship, a naturalism founded on mi-metic principles considered to produce a closerequivalent to reality. The authors' teleological con-cept of Western art is based on the progressive re-finement of formal devices (shading, modeling, per-spective)-a history of visual problem solving-andthe result of the comparison is to characterize thePersianate painting tradition as static, never-chang-ing, lacking in innovation. Binyon, Wilkinson, andGray's remarks would be less troubling if it were notfor the fact that their descriptive language has re-tained its currency in studies of Persianate paintinguntil the present day. Further, given that the paint-ing tradition was seen to exist in a predominantlyaniconic culture, one that frowned on image makersand image use, it was deemed a covert activity, anillicit, secret pleasure that went on behind closeddoors. Cast in this light, the "fantastic" world of Per-sianate painting-its seeming rebuttal, or avoidance,of forms that might approximate perceived reality-was read as decorative (hence "romantic," "marvel-

ous," "incredible").5 8 Moreover, the power of thewindow figure-of the picture as an opening onto aworld extending beyond the frame's edges-and ofperspective is such that many still consider them tobe optically equivalent to the eye's experience, andhence the compositional and spatial systems of thePersianate painting went undefined despite the factthat their complex spatial organization required cog-nitive processes foreign to the perspectivally accus-tomed eye (although we all make sense of what isgoing on in the paintings). A contextual analysis ofpainting was only pursued through its illustrativefunction, and the painting tradition's visual form wasunderstood as a strategy of side-stepping a grave prob-lem: that of usurping God's creative prerogative. Vi-sually, this avoidance was effected through a non-mimetic mode of representation so that what wasdepicted could not be confused with its referent outthere in the real world. The comments of Binyon,Wilkinson, and Gray illustrate the dangers of defin-ing a visual tradition's practices and representation-al features through binary opposition: y is defined inrelationship to x by a series of negatives. Indeed, thevisual tradition's categorization has closed off certainlines of interpretation and analysis.

Yet it is becoming increasingly clear that in look-ing at paintings-for that they surely did-contempo-rary viewers had a language to describe, assess, andjudge what they saw, despite the fact that the lack ofan ekphrastic tradition implies an absence of thisparticular form of engagement with the visual. Dis-tinctions between artists were made and connectionsor differences between their works were noted. Aspectsof skill and technical know-how were praised. Thesecomments signal a form of visual awareness and apictorial intelligence that we do not adequately un-derstand as yet, an active engagement that goes be-yond the somewhat soft-focus, contemplative gazingconjured up by the category "decorative" and refiguredin the language used to describe the paintings. Fur-ther consideration of these questions depends on thecontinued study of a host of written sources, of whichthere are many examples, despite the prevailing no-tion of a thin and circumscribed historiographic artliterature. It also depends on allowing the paintingtradition a level of complexity as a postulate, openingup new lines of thinking as opposed to closing themdown.

As I stated earlier, the essays in this third sectionshare similar goals, and to various degrees each one

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uses material and textual sources in tandem. PriscillaSoucek and Yves Porter have both worked extensivelywith written sources. Soucek's groundbreaking essay,titled "Nizami on Painters and Painting" (1972),59examined cultural views of the artist, the creativeprocess, and the perceptual experience. Now she turnsto the subject of portraiture to develop a conceptualframework. After pinpointing inconsistencies in thescholarship on portraiture, she explores the primarysources written in Arabic and Persian, and then ex-amines the implications of cultural concepts of theportrait and their visualization in painted or drawnform.

In earlier research, Yves Porter studied a wide va-riety of texts that are relevant to the study of paint-ing and the arts of the book, which culminated in thebook, Peinture et arts du livre: Essai sur la littgrature tech-nique indo-persane. For his essay, Porter has chosen towork on two texts, one by 'Abdi Beg Shirazi ("Theo-ry of the Two Qalams") and the other by Sadiqi BegAfshar ("Seven Principles of Painting"). In additionto examining connections drawn between the arts ofcalligraphy and depiction (tasvzr: painting and draw-ing), and a terminology used to describe decorativevisual idioms, respectively, Porter makes broader claimsabout the nature of the textual tradition available tous today.

Like the first two, my essay examines tensions be-tween modern and pre-modern methods and concepts,but with specific regard to the relationship betweenperson, hand, and image. Taking the artist Kamal al-Din Bihzad as my principal example, I examine thevarious procedures used by modern scholars to de-termine Bihzad's relationship to works attributed tohim or "signed" by him. A major source that embod-ies an internal concept of authorship is an album as-sembled in 1544-45. The album offers a context thatunites image and text, which allows us to examinecultural views of painting, calligraphy, and their pro-cesses.

LATER RESPONSES TO PAINTINGS AND BOOKS

I will begin my discussion of this fourth and finalsection on an autobiographical note with a descrip-tion of my first experience in manuscript research atthe Topkapi Palace Library. I am sure that I am notthe only one to have had it. As the manuscript waslaid before me on the green-felt-covered table I felt

slightly nervous. I inspected the binding, the dou-blures, looked at the endpapers, and the ex-librissurrounded by notes in numerous hands and vari-ous seals of colored inks and different sizes. My slowprogress through the textblock uncovered paintingsand illumination, with occasional colophons at theend of sections, indicating that the manuscript wasseveral years in production. But nothing seemed tofit together into a coherent assemblage-the paint-ings were stylistically heterogeneous, as was the illu-mination, and the binding seemed to have little ornothing to do with the textblock that it contained.Repairs and additions were discernable, if not pre-cisely datable, and notations on its endpapers sug-gested that the book had moved about with its suc-cessive owners; in these changing contexts it mighthave gone unnoticed for years, gathered dust, andthen was suddenly rediscovered.

Nothing in the general presentation of manuscriptresearch had prepared me for the daunting physicalityof this manuscript. To my chagrin, I quickly discov-ered that the manuscript was more typical than not.Although scholars have been slow to turn to this veryproblem, since 1986, with the publication of the con-ference papers, Les manuscrits du Moyen-Orient: essaisde codicologie et de paliographie, the history of manu-scripts, as it is reflected in internal changes and ad-ditions, has become a category of documentation anda subject of intellectual concern.

Improved record keeping promises to uncover de-tailed provenances for some manuscripts and to ex-pand the array of reference works like Kut and Bay-raktar's Yazma Eserlerde Vaklf Miihiirlei,6° or Lowry andBeach's appendix on seals stamped in the manuscriptsof the Vever collection.6 1 Describing the type andscope of changes to manuscripts whether by limitedrebinding, repair, or more intrusive reworking, or bycompleting unfinished work should make it possibleto gauge the responses elicited by the objects afterproduction and to deduce from them the value placedon books. It would seem important to emphasize herethat this "cultural biography" of things, to borrow IgorKopytoffs phrase,6 2 is part of a long history of objectexchange, of successive commodifications and decom-modifications, stretching back from times contempo-rary to the pre-modern era. Islamic manuscripts mightbe written into a larger history of collecting, 63 and themethods and perspectives offered by anthropology maycontinue to be illuminating.

The reexamination of familiar written sources and

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the use of heretofore neglected ones holds furtherpromise. Uluc's work testifies to the benefits of study-ing inventories, and it could usefully be widened toexamine the book holdings of treasuries, mosques, andpersonal libraries of courtiers and scholars alike, al-though the potential for producing generalized state-ments would often be limited by the paucity of docu-mentation or a narrow chronological scope.6 4 Sucha project might shed further light on the circumstancesthat lay behind the formation of libraries and theircollections. 65 For example, in his history Khwandamirwrites of two investigations in the late Timurid periodof figures suspected of corruption and embezzle-ment. 66 An audit of the vizier Khwaja Majd al-DinMuhammad's property turned up "gold and jewels,rare books, precious wares, bezoar stones, vessels,chinaware, silk carpets, and brocaded canopies andtents."6 7 A second audit of the personal property andholdings of a group of suspect characters produced"so much gold, so many jewels, precious books, finetextiles, horses, pack animals, tents, pavilions, weavings,silk rugs, and objects from Egypt, Anatolia, Europeand China ... that it would be impossible to describethem."68 When the items confiscated from KhwajaMajd al-Din Muhammad were shown to Sultan HusaynMirza, the emperor said, "We trusted Khwaja Majdud-din Muhammad to such an extent that we thoughtwhenever any precious object came into his hands heimmediately presented it to us. Now it seems he wasnot totally honest with us."69 A related historical ac-count that deals with the movement of books involvesthe bibliophile ehid 'Ali Papa, son-in-law of the Ot-toman Sultan Ahmed III. At the pasha's death, AhmedIII ordered an inventory of his library, previouslyendowed as waqf to the Sehzadebal Library in Istan-bul, and its confiscation. A decree was insufficient soa fatwa was issued declaring the ineligibility of theendowment given the content of some of the books.Rogers has shown that the intention of the fatwa wasto augment Ahmed III's library because it specifiedthat "the finer manuscripts among those confiscatedbe sent to the palace and the rest sold." 70

In gauging responses to books, one line of inter-pretation could be to see this inscription of self, ofthe owner taking possession of the book by alteringsome physical or formal feature, as a political act. Itcould be understood as the final, but by no meansinevitable, outcome of the object's cycle of exchange,perhaps acquired through conquest as booty or givenas gift. Some books are inscribed with a genealogy of

ownership so they can be considered as heirlooms; forsome owners, books may have become associated withparticular occasions or events, social interactions orencounters. In some instances changes were made foraesthetic reasons alone, to bring old books into linewith the way things looked in their new context, butwith aspects of their historicity maintained, if onlyselectively.7 1 They also offered a point of comparisonbetween regional and/or dynastic traditions and be-tween the past and present.

Some of these aspects of response and the socialmechanisms of exchange are addressed by ZerenTanlndi, who has turned to these questions in recentyears. She has collected documentation about theperegrinations of practitioners, patrons, and booksfrom a variety of written and material sources datingfrom the sixteenth century, a period of major realign-ment throughout the Islamic world. Tanindl focuseson a particularly active period in the Middle East andeastern Mediterranean when Ottoman campaigns,diplomacy, and political reformations throughout Iranand Central Asia brought about the movement ofpeople and their possessions.

Serpil Bagcl also concentrates on the Ottoman set-ting, but she considers the textual and visual transla-tion of Firdawsi's Shahnama into Turkish. Bagcl exam-ines specific poetic metaphors for translation fromPersian into Turkish (through the image of re-garbing), and the general practice of imitative re-sponse in poetry to examine the ways in which paint-ers also translated received visual idioms into a re-gional dialect. In her essay, the artist's reception ofpaintings and books is very much a living one, a re-sponse involving the incorporation and transforma-tion of non-Ottoman books into an Ottoman visualand written language. It occurs in the historical con-text of the development of a distinct Ottoman aestheticdefined against a Persianate one. 72

A third form of response has to do with judgmentand valuation and a method for articulating them.Sometimes an attributive signature is added to a paint-ing or a librarian's inventory note highlights the nameof the scribe who copied the manuscript, as well asthe number of paintings in it and the text and itsauthor. As I noted earlier, numerous sources discussthe relative merits of calligraphers, artists, and otherartisans, but the meaning of their often esoteric lan-guage can be obscure to the modern reader, and wemay find it difficult to arrive at an equivalent senseusing the categories available to us. The separation

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between evaluation and judgment expressed in wordsand their referents (i.e., specific objects) puts one kindof methodological problem before us. But notationsin manuscripts tell us that in some times and placesforms of valuation were assiduously recorded.73

Numerous manuscripts of foreign origin or localproduction owned by Mughal patrons contain nota-tions that categorize paintings and calligraphy accord-ing to a scale of value (rankings from first to fifth class)using unexplained criteria and methods of connois-seurship. Whether these evaluations can be taken astypical throughout the pre-modern Islamic world isdebatable, for the mania in India could be accountedfor by a bureaucratic impulse-they were the "bean-counters" of their age, or to the habit of naming andidentifying that scholars have traced to Babur's ini-tial response to the Indian subcontinent as reflectedin his memoirs. But Seyller's work on Mughal recep-tion promises to uncover the specific criteria ofjudg-ment that were internal to a culture and to show inwhat ways internal judgments can ultimately challengeor corroborate modem suppositions and value systems.He begins with the ranking system, followed by a sty-listic autopsy of sets of paintings with the objective ofoutlining linkages between paintings and rankings andthereby isolating formal criteria of judgment.

In every case, the essays in the fourth and final cate-gory demonstrate ways of responding to the accumu-lated objects of a past or near present and suggest theways in which such a response could produce its owncanon and reshape the past by selection and rejection.

Harvard UniversityCambridge, Mass.

NOTES

1. The original roster of conference speakers also includedRenata Holod, who presented a paper on a sixteenth-cen-tury Khamsa made in Shiraz, and Elaine Wright, who pre-sented a paper on Ibrahim Sultan b. Shahrukh's Shahnama(Oxford, Bodleian Library, ms. Add. 176). Wright's paperwill be published as part of a book-length study derived fromher doctoral dissertation, "The Look of the Book: Manu-script Production in the Southern Iranian City of Shiraz fromthe Early 14th Century to 1452," in the occasional series,Oxford Studies in Islamic Art (Oxford University Press inassociation with the Chester Beatty Library). Two papers,one by Eva Hoffman and the other by Lale Uluc, were notpart of the conference but are relevant to it, and thereforehave been added to the volume.

2. For example, the exhibition of Persian miniatures held atthe Musee des Arts Ddcoratifs, Paris, 1912. For a list of ex-hibitions between 1900 and 1981, see Nasrin Rohani, A Bib-liography of Persian Miniature Painting (Cambridge, Mass.: AgaKhan Program for Islamic Architecture, 1982), pp. 145-49.

3. Organized by Stephen Vernoit and held at the Victoria andAlbert Museum, London, October 1996.

4. Gfilru Necipoglu organized the conference in 1992 underthe auspices of the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Archi-tecture, Harvard University. The papers were published asa special issue of Ars Orientalis 23 (1993).

5. The Toronto papers were published as a supplement toMuqarnas (ed. Lisa Golombek and Maria Subtelny, TimuridArt and Culture: Iran and Central Asia in the Fifteenth Century[Leiden, New York, Cologne: E.J. Brill, 1992]). The paperspresented at the conference, "New Approaches to PersianArt and Culture," in Washington, D.C., at the Arthur M.Sackler Gallery, were not published.

6. Only a few of the papers were published. See Julian Rabyand Teresa Fitzherbert, eds., The Court of the l-khans 1290-1340, Oxford Studies in Islamic Art 12 (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1996).

7. Sheila R. Canby, ed., Safavid Art and Architecture (London:British Museum Press, to appear).

8. Marianne Barrucand, ed., L Egyptefatimide: son art et son histoire(Paris: Presses de l'Universit6 de Paris-Sorbonne, 1999).

9. For related studies, see Eleanor G. Sims, "The Garrett Manu-script of the Zafar-Name: A Study in Fifteenth-Century Timu-rid Patronage," Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1973; andidem, "The Illustrated Manuscripts of Firdawsi's ShahnamaCommissioned by Princes of the House of Timfur," Ars Orien-talis 22 (1992): 43-68.

10. Wu Hung, The Double Screen: Medium and Representation inChinese Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996),Introduction.

11. A methodological problem considered by Mieke Bal andNorman Bryson, "Semiotics and Art History," Art Bulletin 73,2 (June 1991): 174-208. Bal and Bryson write, "But it is some-times the case that the sequence (from context to text) isactually inferred from its endpoint, leading to the kind ofmetalepsis that Nietzsche called 'chronological reversal"'(ibid., p. 178).

12. There has been some resistance to the pursuit of new av-enues of inquiry. For example, see B. W. Robinson, Fifteenth-Century Persian Painting: Problems and Issues (New York andLondon: New York University Press, 1991), pp. 1-2. Robin-son's criticism was leveled directly at the "somewhat esotericand abstruse nouvelle vague approach set in motion at thesymposium that accompanied the exhibitions of Timurid artand of the Vever Collection at the Sackler Gallery in 1989"(ibid., p. 2). He concluded, "As an old museum man, I preferto deal in objects, facts, dates, and human personalities"(ibid.).

13. Basil Gray, ed., Arts of the Book in Central Asia: 14th-16th Cen-turies (Paris: Unesco, 1979). The volume also contained anextremely useful appendix by 'Abd al-Hayy Habibi in whichimportant written sources were listed and briefly summarized.The taxonomic division and periodization of Arts of the Bookin Central Asia have been followed time after time, for ex-ample, see the essays on the arts of the book (Barbara Brend)

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and painting (Eleanor Sims and Ernst Grube) in The Artsof Persia, ed. R. W. Ferrier (New Haven and London: YaleUniversity Press, 1989). Refinements and additions to theseparate "histories" of techniques and media first treatedin Arts of the Book in Central Asia are the subject of numer-ous entries in the Encyclopaedia Iranica.

14. The most recent studies include Gulnar Bosch,John Carswell,and Guy Petherbridge, Islamic Bindings and Bookmaking (Chi-cago: Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, 1981); Dun-can Haldane, Islamic Bookbindings in the Victoria and AlbertMuseum (London: World of Islam Festival Trust in associa-tion with the Victoria and Albert Museum, 1983); and JulianRaby and Zeren Tanindl, Turkish Bookbinding in the 15th Cen-tury: The Foundation of an Ottoman Court Style (London: Azi-muth Editions, 1993).

15. A ground-breaking volume was published in 1989 from pa-pers given at a conference in Istanbul, May 1986. SeeFrancois Deroche, ed., Les manuscrits du Moyen-Orient: essaisde codicologie et depaliographie, Varia Turcica 8 (Paris: Institutfrancais d'6tudes anatoliennes, 1989). Manuscripts of theMiddle East (Leiden: Ter Lugt Press, 1986), ajournal devotedto the study of manuscripts, edited by Dhroche, Adam Gacekand Jan Just Witkam, was launched in the same year.

16. Exemplary studies about the making of a book and the cul-tural milieu in which they were made include MariannaShreve Simpson, Sultan Ibrahim Mirza's Haft Awrang: A PrincelyManuscript from Sixteenth-Century Iran (New Haven and Lon-don: Yale University Press, 1997); and Sheila S. Blair, A Com-pendium of Chronicles: Rashid al-Din's Illustrated History of theWorld (London and Oxford: The Nour Foundation in asso-ciation with Azimuth Editions and Oxford University Press,1995).

17. For example, Barbara Schmitz, Islamic Manuscripts in the NewYork Public Library (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press and The New York Public Library, 1992); and idem,Islamic and Indian Manuscripts and Paintings in the PierpontMorgan Library (New York: The Pierpont Morgan Library,1997). An equally well-documented catalogue of illustratedmanuscripts in the Topkapi Palace Library is now beingprepared by Filiz Cagman and Zeren Tanindl.

18. Marianna Shreve Simpson, "The Making of Manuscripts andthe Workings of the Kitab-Khana in Safavid Iran," in TheArtist's Workshop, ed. Peter M. Lukehart, Studies in the His-tory of Art 38 (Washington, D.C., 1993), pp. 105-21; andidem, "The Production and Patronage of the Haft AurangbyJami in the Freer Gallery of Art," Ars Orientalis 13 (1982):93-119.

19. The earliest and most developed study is Marianna ShreveSimpson, The Illustration of an Epic: The Earliest ShahnamaManuscripts (New York: Garland Publishers, 1979). Simpsonnotes that methods of illustration generally accepted forWestern manuscripts may not be applicable to the earlyperiod of Persianate painting in books (ibid., p. 39).

20. For example, Priscilla Parsons Soucek, "Illustrated Manu-scripts of Nizami's Khamseh: 1386-1482," Ph.D. diss., New YorkUniversity, 1971.

21. Oleg Grabar and Sheila Blair, Epic Images and ContemporaryHistory: The Illustrations of the Great Mongol Shahnama (Chi-cago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980); andmore recently, Abolala S6udavar, "The Saga of Abu-Sa'id

Bahador Khan. The Abu-Sa'idndm," in The Court of the I-khans1290-1340, ed. Raby and Fitzherbert, pp. 95-211. Grabarand Blair's thesis needs to be modified as codicological evi-dence suggests that the total number of manuscript illus-trations is significantly higher than they had first estimated(approximately 190 instead of 120), thus challenging theirconclusions about the manipulation of narrative cycles as-sociated with particular kings or heroes in the Shahnama (seeSheila S. Blair, "On the Track of the 'Demotte' ShahnamaManuscript," in Manuscrits du Moyen-Orient, pp. 124-31). Agreater problem, however, rests in the assumptions aboutthe Shahnama as a text. Modern studies tend to imagine acomprehensive edition of the text (after the E. E. Bertels'edition) and do not consider the possibility that some cyclesof kings could be omitted entirely or that stories in cyclescould be deleted or abbreviated. In other words, the con-cept of a text was far more elastic in its constitution anddynamic in its make-up than has been accounted for. Grabarand Blair discuss this problem (Epic Images, pp. 1-2), not-ing that there "are as many versions of the Shahnama as therewere manuscripts." The implications of this fact did not deterthem from reconstructing the manuscript's illustrative pro-gram.

22. See Norman Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of theAncien Regime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1981).

23. See Yves Porter, Peinture et arts du livre: Essai sur la littraturetechnique indo-persane (Louvain: Peeters, 1992). Interest inartists' materials is evidenced in early scholarship. On thesubject of paper, for example, see Josef Karabacek, "Dasarabische Papier. Eine historisch-antiquarische Untersu-chung," Mittheilungen aus der Sammlung der Papyrus ErzherzogRainer 3 (1887): 87-178; and idem, "Neue Quellen zurPapiergeschichte," Mittheilungen aus der Sammlung der Papy-rus ErzherzogRainer 4 (1888): 1-48.

24. As noted by Marianna Shreve Simpson, "Islamic Painting andHistory," Asian Art 1, 4 (Fall, 1988): 3-6. Given the ubiq-uity of the dynasty/metropolitan center taxonomic frame-work it would be redundant to provide a comprehensive listof publications that use it, but among the most developedare B. W. Robinson, "Survey of Persian Painting," in Art etsocieti dans le monde iranien, ed. C. Adle, (Paris: Editions Re-cherche sur les civilisations, 1982), pp. 13-82; and NorahM. Titley, Persian Miniature Painting and Its Influence on theArt of Turkey and India: The British Library Collections (Aus-tin: University of Texas Press, 1983).

25. Regional painting traditions formerly excluded from thedominant narrative of Persianate painting-principally theTurkman Qaraqoyunlu and Aqqoyunlu-were admitted toit through the scholarly endeavor of B. W. Robinson. For aconcise summary of the argument, scholarly references, anda list of key manuscripts, see Robinson, Fifteenth-Century Per-sian Painting, chap. 2. For longer versions, see Robinson'schapter in Arts of the Book in Central Asia.

26. Such an early scholarly text as F. R. Martin's The MiniaturePainting and Painters of Persia, India, and Turkey from the Eighthto the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (London: Bernard Quaritch,1912), refers to a panoply of written sources, though itsmethodological emphasis is to locate materials in a time andplace. A slightly different focus becomes evident by the late

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1920's in the work of Arnold and Stchoukine. See the in-terweaving of sources in Thomas W. Arnold, Painting in Is-lam: A Study of the Place of Pictorial Art in Muslim Culture(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), esp. chap. 1; andidem, "Mirza Muhammad Haidar Dughlat on the HaratSchool of Painters," Bulletin of the School of Oriental and Afri-can Studies 5, 4 (1930): 671-74. Arnold was one of the ear-liest scholars to turn to the tazkira (biographical notices).Stchoukine similarly culls textual references from a varietyof written sources to build biographical profiles (see IvanStchoukine, Les peintures des manuscrits timf2rides [Paris: Librai-rie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1954], esp. chap. 1; and idem,Les peintures des manuscrits safavis de 1502 1587 [Paris:Librairie Orientaliste Paul Geuthner, 1959], pp. 26-51). Al-though these texts are later, both continue a method ofstudying painting and the arts of the book developed at thebeginning of Stchoukine's scholarly career. Biographicalstudies of artists and calligraphers respectively culminatedin Muhammad 'Ali Karimzada-yi Tabrizi, Ahval va sar-inaqqashan-i qadim-i Iran va barkhi az mashahr-i nigdrgar-i Hindva 'Usmani, 3 vols. (London: Interlink Logograph Ltd., 1985-1991); and Mahdi Bayani, Ahvdl va asdr-i khvushnivisdn, 2vols. (Tehran: 'Ilmi, 1363 [1984]).

27. As noted by Glenn D. Lowry with Susan Nemazee, A Jeweler'sEye: Islamic Arts of the Book from the Vever Collection (Washing-ton, D. C., Seattle, and London: Smithsonian Institution andUniversity of Washington Press, 1988), pp. 29 and 43-44.

28. Two scholars have treated compositional and spatial aspectsof the painting at some length: Chahryar Adle, "Recherchesur le module et le trace correcteur dans la miniatureorientale," Le Monde Iranien et l'lslam 3 (1975): 81-105; andRobert Hillenbrand, "The Uses of Space in Timurid Paint-ing," in Timurid Art and Culture, pp. 76-102.

29. The study of images outside of book illustration is very lim-ited. For essays on wall painting, see Thomas W. Lentz,"Dynastic Imagery in Early Timurid Wall Painting," Muqarnas10 (1993): 253-65; and Lisa Golombek, "The Paysage asFunerary Imagery in the Timurid Period," Muqarnas 10(1993): 241-52; esp. pp. 242-48.

30. Ehsan Yarshater, "Some Common Characteristics of PersianPoetry and Art," Studia Islamica 16 (1962): 61-72; N. M.Titley, "Persian Miniature Painting: The Repetition of Com-positions during the Fifteenth Century," in ArchiologischeMitteilungen aus Iran 6 = Akten des VII. Internationalen Kongressesfur Iranische Kunst und Archiologie, Mftnchen 7-10 September1976 (Berlin, 1979), pp. 471-90; and Adel Adamova, Rep-etition of Composition in Manuscripts: The Khamsa of Nizamiin Leningrad," in Timurid Art and Culture, pp. 67-75. For struc-tural and aesthetic affinities between poetry, music, callig-raphy, and painting, see J. Christoph Bfirgel, The Feather ofSimurgh: The "Licit Magic" of the Arts in Medieval Islam (NewYork and London: New York University Press, 1988).

31. Lisa Golombek, "Toward a Classification of Islamic Paint-ing," in Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed.Richard Ettinghausen (New York: The Metropolitan Museumof Art, 1972), pp. 23-34; 23. Golombek notes that by thelate fourteenth century "the manuscript is no longer an il-lustrated text but an album of paintings" (ibid., p. 23).

32. Lowry with Nemazee, Jeweler's Eye, p. 43.33. Oleg Grabar, "Persian Miniatures: Illustrations or Paintings,"

in The Persian Presence in the Islamic World, ed. Richard G.Hovannisian and Georges Sabagh (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998), pp. 199-217. The paper is a reworkedversion of an earlier article with some shifts of emphasis(idem, "Toward an Aesthetic of Persian Painting," in TheArt of Interpreting, ed. Susan C. Scott [University Park, Penna.:Pennsylvania State University, 1995], pp. 131-62).

34. Exceptions in original viewing context include large-formatpaintings, some identifiable as stories from the Shahnama,now bound into the Baysunghur album (Istanbul, TSK, H.2152) and datable to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Iran,and paintings produced and used in an Ottoman context.Scholars have argued that these paintings were used asvisual adjuncts to a storyteller's recitations in a manner com-parable to several other cultural traditions (for comparanda,see Victor H. Mair, Painting and Performance: Chinese PictureRecitation and Its Indian Genesis [Honolulu: University ofHawaii Press, 1988]). Essays on the Islamic material com-prise Banu Mahir, "A Group of 17th-Century Paintings Usedfor Picture Recitation," in Art Turc/ Turkish Art, 10th Inter-national Congress of Turkish Art (Geneva: Fondation Maxvan Berchem, 1999), pp. 443-55; and Nurhan Atasoy, "Il-lustrations Prepared for Display during Shahname Recitals,"in Memorial Volume of the Vth International Congress of IranianArt and Archaeology, ed. A. Tajvidi and M.Y. Kiani (Tehran:Ministry of Culture and Arts, 1972), pp. 262-72.

35. Although Grabar has implied that the absorbing power ofthe painting is such that "once a viewer is caught, he wan-ders within the miniature trying to understand how it worksand what is in it, so as almost to forget that he is holding a book"[italics added] (idem, "Toward an Aesthetic," p. 139).

36. The question of language has two parts to it: first, the needfor a terminology that is used consistently; and second, theanalysis of the descriptive language used to articulate visualphenomena and experiences, remembering all the while thework that language does for us. Much of the scholarship onPersianate painting is the unabashedly personal embodimentof subjective response that Grabar calls "libertarian" ("To-ward an Aesthetic," pp. 132-33). Whether these literary re-sponses are valid or invalid, or even avoidable, despite thechecks that historians have put on their writing, is perhapsless critical at this moment than the development of aninternal language of criticism and judgment and the basiccriteria upon which distinctions were made. For a review ofquestions of language, literary style, and method in historicalwriting in this century, see David Hackett Fischer, "TheBraided Narrative: Substance and Form in Social History,"in The Literature of Fact: Selected Papers from the English Insti-tute, ed. Angus Fletcher (New York: Columbia UniversityPress, 1976), pp. 109-33.

37. References to published editions and translations of someof these sources are listed in Porter's bibliography for Peintureet arts du livre. The best source for scholarly articles, primarywritten sources, and unpublished manuscripts is still 'Abdal-Hayy Habibi, "Literary Sources for the History of the Artsof the Book in Central Asia," appendix 1, in Arts of the Bookin Central Asia, pp. 273-80.

38. For translation, see Wheeler M. Thackston, "Treatise onCalligraphic Arts: A Disquisition on Paper, Colors, Inks, andPens," in Intellectual Studies on Islam: Essays Written in Honor

14

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of Martin B. Dickson, ed. Michel M. Mazzaoui and Vera B.Moreen (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990), pp.219-28. For references to Persian editions and critical lit-erature on the text and its author, see ibid., n. 1.

39. For commentary on text, English translation, and referencesto Arabic editions, see DavidJames, "The Commentaries ofIbn al-Basis and Ibn al-Wahid on Ibn al-Bawwab's 'Ode onthe Art of Calligraphy' (Ra'iyyah f l1-khatt)," in Back to theSources: Biblical and Near Eastern Studies in Honour of DermotRyan, ed. Kevin J. Cathcart and John F. Healey (Dublin:Glendale Press, 1989), pp. 164-91.

40. Good overviews of the manifold aspects of bookmakingmaterials and practices can be found in Porter, Peinture etarts du livre, and Johannes Pedersen, The Arabic Book, trans.Geoffrey French (Princeton: Princeton University Press,1984), esp. chap. 3. Pedersen's text also provides some in-sight into the culture of the book beyond courtly circles.

41. See Elizabeth Fitzhugh West, "Study of Pigments on SelectedPaintings from the Vever Collection," appendix 9, and JanetG. Snyder, "Study of the Paper of Selected Paintings fromthe Vever Collection," appendix 10, in An Annotated and Il-lustrated Checklist of the Vever Collection, ed. Glenn D. Lowryand Milo Cleveland Beach (Washington, D. C., and Seattleand London: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Insti-tution and University of Washington Press, 1988). Studieson paper are currently in preparation byJonathan Bloom,and by Helen Lovejoy and Dan Baker at the British Museum,London.

42. In her conference paper, Elaine Wright focused on the il-lustration and planning of a Shahnama for Ibrahim Sultanb. Shahrukh, examining also the concept of the poetic visualidiom.

43. On the phrase bi-rasm-i and the noun kitabkhana, seeChahryar Adle, "Entre Timourides, Mogoles et Safavides:Notes sur un ChahnAm6 de l'atelier bibliothhque royald'Ologh Beg II a Caboul," in Art Islamique et Orientalisme,sales catalogue, Drouot-Richelieu, Paris (15June 1990), pp.133-48.

44. Istanbul, TSK, H. 2153, fol. 119b, trans. Wheeler M. Thack-ston, A Century of Princes: Sources on Timurid History and Art(Cambridge, Mass.: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Archi-tecture, 1989), p. 329. Possibly Shaykh Muhammad al-Imamial-Harawi to a patron (probably Sultan Ya'qub or RustamAqqoyunlu).

45. Istanbul, TSK, H. 2153, fol. 137a, trans. Thackston, Centuryof Princes, p. 330. Probably Shaykh Mahmud Harawi to PirBudaq or Sultan Ya'qub Aqqoyunlu.

46. In fact, a variety of terms are used to refer to the kitabkhanain the waqfnma, including bayt al-kutub, dar al-kutub, anddar al-masahif wa kutub al-hadtth. For a discussion of theseterms and a reconstruction of the complex, see Sheila S.Blair, "Ilkhanid Architecture and Society: An Analysis of theEndowment Deed of the Rab'-i Rashidi," Iran 22 (1984): 67-90. The kitabkhana was located at the upper left corner ofthe founder's tomb (rawda) adjacent to a winter mosque andthe quarters of the custodian's assistant (nazir) (ibid., p. 76).Contrary to the endowment deed, Rashid al-Din's lettersmention two storehouses (dar al-kutub) flanking the founder'stomb (Rashid al-Din Fadl Allah, Mukatabdt-i Rashtdi, ed.Muhammad Shafi' [Lahoie: Nashriyat-i Kultiya-yi Panjab,

1367/1947], pp. 236-37), although some scholars have ques-tioned the authenticity of the letters (for debate, see Blair,"Ilkhanid Architecture," p. 88, n. 5). The endowment deedalso mentions the texts that were to be copied each yearand stipulates the type of paper to be used and the qualityof the script. Copies were to be transcribed from originalshoused in the ddr al-kutub. One section of the text reads:"The rooms in which the copyists sit and do the copyingshall be chosen by the superintendant from among the roomsof the institution stipulated for persons and tasks" (seeRashid al-Din Fadl Allah, "Articles of Endowment of the Rab'-i-Rashidi," trans. W. M. Thackston, appendix 1, in Blair, Com-pendium of Chronicles, pp. 114-15; 114). The passage impliesthat any number of different rooms could be used for copy-ing and other bookmaking procedures.

47. For facsimile of text and discussion of terms used, see KemalM. Ozergin, "Temfirlfi sanatina Ait eski bir belge: TebrizliCa'fer'in bir arzl," Sanat Tarihi Yzllz 6 (1976): 471-518; forEnglish translation with notes, see Wheeler M. Thackston,"Arzadasht," appendix 1, in Thomas W. Lentz and GlennD. Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Cul-ture in the Fifteenth Century (Los Angeles and Washington,D.C.: Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Smithson-ian Institution, 1989), pp. 364-65.

48. For Persian text and English translation, see EbadollahBahari, Bihzad: Master of Persian Painting (London and NewYork: I. B. Tauris, 1996), pp. 184-85.

49. The general production of Arabic books and the book marketis discussed in Pedersen, Arabic Book. A study of the mak-ing of books beyond the realm of royal production and re-gional courts (as constellations to the central court) remainsto be undertaken with the exception of Shiraz in the six-teenth century. A source like Sam Mirza Safavi's Tuhfa-yi SamZ(completed by 1561-62) contains numerous references, forexample, to poets who started out life as bookmakers,papersellers, and scribes, or who combined these professionswith their poetic activities.

50. In her wider study of manuscripts comprising book sectionswith differently dated colophons, Simpson shows that theHaft Awrang made for Ibrahim Mirza was no exception andsuggests that the completed manuscript components mayhave been sent to a commercial bindery for collation"(Marianna Shreve Simpson, "Codicology in the Service ofChronology: The Case of Some Safavid Manuscripts," inManuscrits du Moyen-Orient, pp. 133-40; 137).

51. Washington, D. C., Smithsonian Institution, Freer Galleryof Art, cat. no. 54.116. For illustration of the margin anddiscussion of the Jahangir album, see Esin Atil, The Brushof the Masters: Drawings from Iran and India (Washington, D.C.:Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, 1978), pp. 104-11; 106-7.

52. Trans. Thackston, Century of Princes, p. 362.53. Many of these problems were implicit in a recent essay by

Robert Hillenbrand ("The Iconography of the Sh5.h-nama-yi Shahi," Pembroke Papers 4 [1996]: 53-78). He posits thehigh cost of the Shahnama-yi Shi.h, made for Shah Tahmasp,noting that changes in painting by the end of the fifteenthcentury-basically, the image's saturation with detail-hadpriced illustrated Shdhnamas out of the market, given thetext's traditionally high rate of illustration (ibid., pp. 56-

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57). But in order to sustain the hypothesis a comprehen-sive exploration of workshop economics, lacking in thisarticle, would need to be pursued. Even if documentationis lacking it would still be possible to describe those partsof the model that are problematic.

54. Thomas W. Lentz examined Baysunghur's patronage andthe various filters with which any historical analysis of theprince must reckon (idem, "Painting at Herat underBaysunghur ibn Shah Rukh," Ph.D. diss., Harvard Univer-sity, 1985).

55. Elaine Wright's conference paper examined the program-ing of text and image using a copy of Firdawsi's Shahnama.She placed manuscript making squarely under princely su-pervision and infers his direct involvement, which offers yetanother production model.

56. Laurence Binyon, J. V. S. Wilkinson, and Basil Gray, PersianMiniature Painting: A Descriptive Catalogue of the MiniaturesExhibited at Burlington House, January-March 1931 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 5.

57. Ibid.58. Grabar "Toward an Aesthetic," p. 132, he argues for the

legitimate use of such language.59. Priscilla P. Soucek, "Nizami on Painters and Painting," in

Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, pp. 9-21.60. Gfinay Kut and Nimet Bayraktar, Yazma Eserlerde VakzfMlhr-

lenr (Ankara: Basbakanhk Baslmevi, 1984).61. Lowry and Beach, Annotated Checklist, p. 6.62. Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things: Commo-

ditization as Process," in The Social Life of Things: Commodi-ties in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 64-94. The phrase-ology chosen by Kopytoff may imply a certain kind of per-sonification of the object. For some of the potential excep-tions taken by people to the implied personification, seeW. J. T. Mitchell, "What Do Pictures Really Want?," October77 (1996): 71-82; 71-73.

63. Two studies immediately spring to mind: Priscilla P. Soucekand Filiz Cagman, "A Royal Manuscript and Its Transfor-mation: The Life History of a Book," in The Book in the Is-lamic World: The Written Word and Communication in the MiddleEast, ed. George N. Atiyeh (Albany: State University of NewYork Press, 1995), pp. 179-208; and Filiz Cagman and Zeren

Tanindl, "Remarks on Some Manuscripts from the TopkapiPalace Treasury in the Context of Ottoman-Safavid Rela-tions," Muqarnas 13 (1996): 132-48.

64. One example of the creative use of neglected written sourcesis the ijaza (licenses to transmit texts that had been learnedby memory through a teacher). Who would have anticipatedthe benefit of reading fifteenth-century ijaza, sources thatgive us an idea of the curriculum taught in certain madrasas,of the books that constituted knowledge in a particular timeand place. See Maria E. Subtelny and Anas B. Khalidov, "TheCurriculum of Islamic Higher Learning in Timurid Iran inthe Light of the Sunni Revival under Shah-Rukh," Journalof the American Oriental Society 115, 2 (1995): 210-36.

65. One such study is Ismail E. Erfinsal, Tfrk Kitlphaneleri Tarihi11: Kurulustan Tanzimat'a kadar Osmanlz Vakzf Kitfphaneleri(Ankara: Atatfirk Kfiltfr Merkezi Yaylnl, 1991).

66. Khwandamir, Habibu 's-siyar. Tome Three: The Reign of the Mongoland The Turk, 2 vols., trans. and ed. W. M. Thackston, Sourcesof Oriental Languages and Literatures, ed. inasi Tekin andG6nfil Alpay Tekin (Cambridge, Mass.: Dept. of Near East-ern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University, 1994).

67. Ibid., 2: 452.68. Ibid., 2: 462-63.69. Ibid., 2: 452.70. J. M. Rogers, Empire of the Sultans: Ottoman Art from the Col-

lection of Nasser D. Khalili (London: The Nour Foundationin association with Azimuth Editions, 1995), pp. 19-20.

71. DavidJ. Roxburgh, "Catalogue of Scripts by the Seven Mas-ters (H. 2310): A Timurid Calligraphy Album at the Otto-man Court," in Art Turc/ Turkish Art, pp. 587-97.

72. Gfilru Necipoglu, "From International Timurid to Ottoman:A Change in Taste in Sixteenth-Century Ceramic Tiles,"Muqarnas 7 (1990): 136-70; and idem, "A Kanun for theState, A Canon for the Arts: Conceptualizing the ClassicalSynthesis of Ottoman Art and Architecture," in Soliman leMagnifique et Son Temps, ed. Gilles Veinstein, Actes du col-loque de Paris galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 7-10 mars1990 (Paris, 1992), pp. 194-216.

73 John Seyller, "The Inspection and Valuation of Manuscriptsin the Imperial Mughal Library," Artibus Asiae 57, 3-4 (1997):243-349.

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