Special Issue: Perspectives on the Material Culture of the Muslim Near East
Visualization of Texts
Scenes of Mourning in the Great Mongol Shāhnāma
2017 Volume 52 Pages 5-20
Details
2017 Volume 52 Pages 5-20
The so-called “Great Mongol Shāhnāma” is an illustrated manuscript attributable to Tabrīz (northwest Iran) in the 1330s during the Ilkhanid period. Only one-fourth of the original manuscript survives and its folios are currently dispersed among collections. To examine how the painters prepared their illustrations for this manuscript, this paper takes up the scenes of mourning, which was an uncommon subject for illustration. When the text and the image are closely examined together, it is clear that the painters followed only the text transcribed on the folios they were assigned to illustrate. They tried to visualize what was written in the text as much as possible, almost word by word, but had to compensate for some lack of information with contemporary funerary customs. The discrepancy between the text and image (i.e. exterior vs. interior setting) of the “Picture of the Coffin of Iskandar” (Freer Gallery of Art, F1938.3), one of the most famous paintings from the manuscript, can be fully understood when this suggested procedure of creating illustrations is considered.
