The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Sultan Muhammad · a painting on a single folio of the Shahnameh made for Shah Tahmasp · opaque watercolour, ink, silver and gold on paper · Tabriz, about 1522 to 1525 · unsigned, given to Sultan Muhammad by Dust Muhammad in 1544 · the folio scored as one object, the painting whole on its page, its book dispersed in the twentieth century · Aga Khan Museum, Toronto
Mode
Royal manuscript painting as political theology; the illustration of an epic turned into an image of the order of the world
Mythos
The first king and the first age; the world mountain and its summit; the dynasty at the root of kingship; peace before the first death
Phase
The court of Gayumars at its height, before the Black Div kills Siyamak; painted at Tabriz in the first campaign of the young Tahmasp’s book
Presentation
A single painted folio, opaque watercolour, ink, silver and gold on paper, with a block of Ferdowsi’s text set into the composition; one of the 258 paintings the manuscript held
Register
Radiant wonder throughout, from the gold sky to a face half hidden in a stone; plenty without dread, with a joke at the edges
Scale
One page held in the hands; a whole society, its beasts and its earth, around one king
Governing Proposition
On one page of a book of kings made for a boy who would be shah, the first king of the world holds court on a mountain, his people around him in the same leopard skins, his son and grandson at his side, the beasts lying quiet among them and the rocks themselves alive with faces. The wager of the painting is that sovereignty is an order of the whole creation, everything turned toward one centre, and that a page held in the hands can contain a world that the eye cannot finish.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The Court of Gayumars is one painting on one page of a Shahnameh, Ferdowsi’s book of kings, made for Shah Tahmasp: the manuscript long known as the Houghton Shahnameh. It is painted in opaque watercolour, ink, silver and gold on paper, at Tabriz, about 1522 to 1525, and it is given to Sultan Muhammad, head of the royal workshop there in the 1520s. The book was begun under Shah Ismail for the young Tahmasp and carried on into the 1530s; it held 258 paintings, and this is among the earliest of them. What is scored here is the painting on its page, with the short block of Ferdowsi’s text set into it, as it stands. The other paintings, the calligraphy, the binding and the book as a sequence are its setting, not the work.
Tahmasp was born in 1514. The book was made for a prince of about ten, and its first great image was made to be held in his hands. It is read at a distance of under half a metre, and at its finest its detail lies below what the unaided eye can separate. It is not a picture to be taken in from across a room. The eye enters it and keeps finding more: a court, then the faces in the court, then the beasts among them, then the creatures in the trees and the faces in the stone. It is a world that cannot be seen whole at once.
The page has its place in the poem. After the prologues, Ferdowsi opens the reign of kings with Gayumars, the first king, and in the Iranian tradition the first man. The painting stands at that opening, with the poem’s words set into it, so that it is read as a page of a book is read, in sequence, the first sovereign after the prologues that begin the work. The form is the book’s: a painting made to be turned to, and turned from, toward the reigns that follow.
Movement II
Gayumars holds court on a mountain. He is enthroned at its summit, and he and his people wear the same leopard skins. Beside him are his son Siyamak and his grandson Hushang. Around and below him the courtiers are ranged in an arc, every face turned toward him, and among them the animals lie at peace with men, as in a first age before enmity. The first court is a court of fellowship before it is a court of power: the king is among his people, dressed as they are, and set apart only by where he sits and by the light.
The painting makes of this a claim that can be stated. Rule is an order of the whole creation. The king at the summit is the point toward which men, beasts and the living rock all turn, and the world is arranged by his presence in it. Three generations at the apex, king, son and grandson, set dynasty into the beginning of kingship itself. In a book made for a boy who would rule, the image is a political theology: this is what a sovereign is, and this is what his realm is when it is rightly ordered. The courtiers are Safavid courtiers, with the faces and manners of Tabriz, and the first king is also the young Tahmasp’s ancestor and his model.
For anyone who knows the next lines there is a shadow. The Black Div will kill Siyamak, the son at his father’s side, and the first grief will enter the world. The painting does not show the div; the menace is outside the frame, carried by the text and by the reader’s knowledge, not felt in the image. What it shows is the harmony as it stood the instant before. That is its limit and its gravity at once: it discloses how kingship wished to see itself, beautifully, and it does not put the wish to the test.
Movement III
Above the mountain is a gold sky. The mountain itself is a heaped and glowing mass of coloured stone, in pinks, blues, greens and mauves, and the figures climb it in a spiral toward the apex, so that a field crowded from edge to edge is held on one centre. Below run a stream and flowering trees. The gold and the colours of the rock are pitched so that the king stays the brightest point of attention in all that press. Each courtier’s face is drawn as a person, and the leopard-skin spotting, the fur of the beasts and the foliage are distinct textures at a scale of millimetres.
The rocks look back. Faces open in the stone, half hidden, as if creation itself were awake and attending. They come from the visionary, crowded style of Tabriz under the Aq Qoyunlu, the Turkman inheritance, with its animate rocks and dense growth. The figures come from the other inheritance, the disciplined classicism of Herat associated with Bihzad, with its clear spaces and legible bodies. Here the Herat figure stands in the Tabriz world, at a density and a scale of conception neither tradition had reached, and the two are reconciled into one physics: everything is alive, and everything turns toward the king. The king at the summit and a face in a rock at the edge are painted by the same animating hand.
The law strains only at the margins. Some of the rock grotesques sit a little apart from the painting’s gravity, a joke within the hymn, and several of them, like a pair of grazing animals or the courtiers at the far ends of the arc, could go without loss. Where the density is greatest it outruns legibility, and the outer figures thin toward pattern. The centre is necessary and the edges are abundant, which is where a painting of plenty pays for its plenty.
Movement IV
The painting is unsigned. In 1544 Dust Muhammad wrote a preface to the album he compiled for Bahram Mirza, and in it he singled out a painting of Gayumars and his court in leopard skins as the work of Sultan Muhammad, and praised it above the rest. The attribution rests on that passage, and the literature accepts it. Within about twenty years of its making the painting had been honoured by the historian of its own workshop, and his praise is the first record of a page that held the painters who came after.
The book went on for another decade and more, and by most accounts its later paintings, Sultan Muhammad’s among them, turn cooler and more Herati, as if the court’s taste moved away from what this page had dared. The fusion it made was the summit of early Safavid painting and the clearest single statement of the synthesis on which Persian painting of the sixteenth century rests. It was also, within the book, an early height that the book itself did not keep to.
The workshop that made the manuscript trained Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad, who carried Persian practice to India and into the founding of Mughal painting. That reach belongs to the workshop more than to this page. The page had less time in the open than its makers did. Within a quarter of a century of Dust Muhammad’s praise it left Iran altogether.
Movement V
In 1568 Tahmasp gave the manuscript to the Ottoman sultan Selim II. It stayed in the Ottoman palace collection until about the beginning of the twentieth century, and for more than three centuries the painting was effectively out of the field’s sight. Its standing as a masterpiece is in large part a recovery of the twentieth century. The image did not change in the palace; what changed is that for most of its life the field it had led could not see it.
The manuscript later belonged to Baron Edmond de Rothschild, and in 1959 it was bought by Arthur A. Houghton Jr. He dispersed it. From the 1970s folios left the book as gifts and sales, and in 1994 the remaining folios went to Iran in exchange for a painting by de Kooning. The page no longer stands where it was made to stand, after the prologues and before the reign of Hushang; its book is broken, and its sequence survives only as a record.
The folio is now in the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, which opened in 2014. As a work on paper it is shown rarely and briefly, for its own protection. About five hundred years after it was painted the image is whole on its page: the gold sky, the coloured mountain, the court in its leopard skins, the faces in the stone. The king sits at the summit with his son beside him, and the div has not yet come.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites on a painting of profusion. The core cannot go: Gayumars enthroned at the apex, his son and grandson beside him, the arc of courtiers turned toward him, the mountain that lifts him and the beasts lying quiet among them. That is the argument, a world ordered around its first sovereign, and the crowding is argued too, since the first age is an age of plenty and the profusion is what the reign holds. But a viewer who lost a third of the faces in the rocks, a pair of the grazing animals or several courtiers at the ends of the arc would lose nothing the painting needs. The rock grotesques are a Turkman workshop habit carried in, not a requirement of the subject. Necessity is real at the centre and loose at the edges.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The disclosure is a claim about sovereignty that can be stated: rule is an order of the whole creation, with the king at the summit as the point toward which men, beasts and even the living rock turn; and the first court was a court of fellowship before it was a court of power, the king among his people in the same leopard skins. In a book made for a boy who would rule, that is a political theology, not a mood. A shadow falls for anyone who knows the next lines: the son at the king’s side is about to be killed. What holds the axis below the gate is that the meaning is an ideal rather than a condition shown true. The painting discloses how kingship wished to see itself, and does not test the wish.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Elevation of the radiant kind, recurring across the whole field rather than arriving once. The gold sky above the mountain; the mountain itself, a heaped and glowing mass of coloured stone in pinks, blues, greens and mauves; the king in the light at its top, set apart and still within the press; the courtiers’ faces, each its own, ranged around him; the stream and flowering trees below; and wherever the eye stays, another small world opening in the rock or the grass. It is transport by plenitude, a painting that cannot be exhausted at one sitting, and it holds its height from the whole page down to the brushstroke. Held below the top by register: a luminous wonder without dread or grandeur of size, and the coming div is outside the frame.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Myth built, not evoked. The subject is the beginning of kingship and of human society, and the painting builds that beginning as structure: a world mountain as axis, the sovereign at its apex, the court a ring of humanity turned on one centre, the animals at peace with men as in a first age before enmity, the rock alive with faces as if creation were still awake. The three generations at the summit set dynasty into the archetype at its root. The particular stays particular: these are Safavid courtiers in leopard skin, with the faces and manners of Tabriz, and the first king is also the young Tahmasp’s ancestor and model. Held below the top because the myth is Ferdowsi’s and arrives with the text; the painting adds the built form, not a new pattern.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The inheritance is double: the visionary, crowded Turkman style of Tabriz under the Aq Qoyunlu, with its animate rocks and dense vegetation, and the disciplined Timurid classicism of Herat associated with Bihzad, with its clear spaces and legible figures. The departure is their fusion at a density and a scale of conception neither had reached: the Herat figure set in the Tabriz world, a whole society on one page. The stake was real and partly paid. The painting belongs to the first campaign of the young shah’s book, and by most accounts the later paintings of the manuscript, Sultan Muhammad’s among them, turn cooler and more Herati, as if the court’s taste moved away from what this page had dared. Held near the gate because a synthesis, however complete, turns inside a tradition rather than out of it.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Change the form and much of what it knows goes. The painting is made for a page held in the hands at reading distance, and its knowledge is that a whole world can be contained in that space and still not be exhausted: the eye goes in and finds more at every magnification. Enlarged to a wall, the small worlds in the rocks would become ornament and the king a figure on a hill; reduced to a plate in a printed book, the gold and the depth of the colour go dead. The block of Ferdowsi’s text set into the composition makes it a page of a book, read in sequence, the first king after the prologues. Held below the top because its meaning, sovereignty as cosmic order, could be carried by other forms, if less fully.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Evidence over promise. The record of return begins with Dust Muhammad in 1544, whose praise shows a painting that held the generation after its makers, and the formal yield has not run out since: the faces in the rocks, the creatures in the trees, the separate expression on each courtier, the play of the rock colours. A viewer finds new things on a tenth visit. The semantic questions are fewer and narrower: how the painting serves Safavid kingship, what the leopard skins and the mountain owe to the Turkman inheritance, who in the arc is meant as whom, how the page stands to the rest of the manuscript. Its literature is serious but concentrated in a few scholars since the 1970s, and the debate has not widened as it has for the deepest works. Formal depth very high, semantic depth good.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is Persianate painting of the 1520s and after. The intrinsic force is near the top: by common consent this is the summit of early Safavid painting and the clearest single statement of the synthesis on which Persian painting of the sixteenth century rests. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the painting was seen and honoured in its own field, singled out by Dust Muhammad within twenty years; the workshop that made the manuscript trained Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad, who carried Persian practice to India and to the founding of Mughal painting, though that is the workshop’s reach more than this page’s; and from 1568 the book sat in the Ottoman palace, out of the field’s sight for more than three centuries. Its standing is in large part a twentieth-century recovery, and delayed influence is credited and discounted.
Score: 8.4 / 10
About five hundred years, and the image survives whole on its page. Presence is charged. In 1568 the folio passed with its book from the Safavid library to the Ottoman palace and was little seen for some three and a half centuries; in the twentieth century the manuscript was taken apart, so that the page no longer stands where it was made to stand, after the prologues and before the reign of Hushang. As a work on paper it is shown rarely and briefly, for its own protection. The figure records both facts: centuries with the form whole, which reaches the upper rows of the axis, and a presence interrupted and a book broken, which hold it below the top of them. What survives is the painting entire; what is lost is its place.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of opaque watercolour, gold and ink on paper at its highest reach, and the making is load-bearing: the painting’s claim is plenitude, and only this degree of control makes plenitude legible rather than noisy. Each face in the arc is drawn as a person. The rocks are built of graded, layered colour that reads as stone and as living form at once. The leopard-skin spotting, the fur of the beasts and the foliage are distinct textures at a scale of millimetres. The gold sky and the colours of the mountain are pitched so that the king stays the brightest point in a crowded field, and a spiral of figures climbing to the apex holds everything on one centre. Held a step below the top where the density outruns legibility and the outer figures thin toward pattern.
Score: 9.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the king at the summit and a face half hidden in a rock at the painting’s edge. They obey one law: everything in this world is alive and turned toward a centre, and the king and the stone are painted by the same animating hand. The range is very wide, sky, mountain, water, plant, beast, commoner, prince and sovereign, and each is given the same life without losing its rank. The Herat clarity of the figures and the Tabriz turbulence of the ground, two inheritances that might have fought, are reconciled into one physics. Held below the top because at the edges the Turkman grotesques sit a little apart from the painting’s gravity, a joke within the hymn.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Several orders are held, and held by where they are set. The state: kingship at its origin and the court as its body. Dynasty: king, son and grandson at the summit. The natural order: beasts at peace with men, trees, water, a living earth. The sacred: the first king as bearer of divine glory, creation in its first age. History: the beginning of Iranian kingship, set in the dress and faces of the Safavid present. What holds the axis lowest is what is thin or absent: labour, since these are courtiers and not workers, and the arts Ferdowsi gives to Hushang and his successors have not yet come; consciousness beyond attention; and death, which waits outside the frame. A single page holds this much by compression, and the figure records that it is a single page.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.6, The Inner Law at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.1, and The Sublime and The Living Form at 9.0. A command of watercolour and gold that makes plenitude legible and keeps the king the brightest point in a crowded field; one animating law from the sovereign at the summit to a face in a stone; five centuries with the image whole; radiant elevation that recurs at every scale; and a world made for a page held in the hands.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.8: the state, the dynasty, the natural order, the sacred and history are held, but labour, consciousness beyond attention and death are thin or absent, and the figure records that this is one page. Among the summit gates, The Unconcealment at 8.2 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4: the painting discloses an ideal of kingship rather than a condition shown true, and its reach was the workshop’s more than its own, delayed by more than three centuries out of sight.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.6, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.1, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8 and The Swerve at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 falls short by a tenth and The Unconcealment at 8.2 by three tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 8.2, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.8. The twelve sum to 105.0 and average 8.75, which stands at 8.8, below the 9.0 the summit also requires; the work is held in Tier IV by the gate and the aggregate alike.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the folio as reproduced and as described in the scholarship, not from a fresh encounter with the object: the painting The Court of Gayumars, attributed to Sultan Muhammad, on its page of the Shahnameh made for Shah Tahmasp, now in the Aga Khan Museum, Toronto. No image or written source was consulted. The unit is the single painted folio, the painting with the block of Ferdowsi’s text set into it, scored as it stands. The rest of the manuscript, its other paintings, its calligraphy, its binding and the book as a sequence, is context and not the unit; its dismemberment in the twentieth century bears on this folio only as a fact of presence, weighed under The Imperishable. What now stands is the painting whole on its page, apart from the book it was made for. Ferdowsi’s poem is the occasion, not the object, and is not quoted; Dust Muhammad’s preface of 1544 is paraphrased. Facts and figures that could not be verified are not given, among them the folio number, the number of folios in the manuscript, the dimensions of the painting and of the page, the accession number, whether the painting runs past its ruled frame into the margin, the count of figures, of animals and of faces in the rocks, which youth at the summit is Siyamak and which Hushang, the fine particulars of the painting’s condition, the fineness of the brushes used, and the date of the principal study of the manuscript.