Art: The Gardens of the Princes

In Washington, a landmark show of Persian miniatures

In hindsight, the glories of kings are apt to depend on the available talent. All the last Shah of Iran could rake up by way of a court artist was Andy Warhol. Four hundred years before, his predecessors were more fortunate. The first three-quarters of the 16th century in the courts of Persia formed one of the supreme periods in the history of art: a Middle Eastern equivalent, perhaps, of Florence between 1450 and 1500, or 16th century Venice, or Paris between 1880 and 1930. It was mainly in Tabriz, the capital of the Safavid dynasty, under the patronage of a succession of highly civilized Muslim shahs and princes, that the art of miniature painting was brought to a pitch of aesthetic and technical perfection that had not been imagined before, and has not been approached since.

Last month an exhibition of this work opened at the National Gallery in Washington (it moves to the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Mass., in late March). There seems to be no reason to doubt the organizers’ claim that it is “probably the greatest assemblage of 16th century Iranian painting seen together in 400 years.” Under the curatorial hand of Art Historian Stuart Gary Welch, several works have been brought together. The centerpiece is the Houghton Shahnama, or Book of Kings, in itself a miniature museum of the work of the greatest court artists of Tabriz, those who were assembled under the rule of Shah Tahmasp. There are other major manuscripts too, including Nizami’s Quintet (a cycle of five illustrated poems), along with a group of separate miniatures.

Few exhibitions have offered such extreme pleasures to the eye. Though the pleasures are taxing, because of a scale of detail so tiny that the museum supplies magnifying glasses, Christopher Marlowe’s phrase, “Infinite riches in a little room,” takes on a special meaning with these miniatures. They are the condensed products of an immense appetite for the world and its fruits, compressed into a few square inches of surface. They are also fresher than most European Renaissance paintings because they have been protected between the covers of books, so that the pigment has not faded through exposure to light. The one exception to this is the silver leaf that Safavid artists customarily used to represent water: it has tarnished, turning the garden fountains, the rivers and waterfalls to soot.

A combination of utter vividness, precision of detail and fantasticated, rhythm ical design breathes from nearly all the miniatures, but especially from the work of the Safavid court artist Sultan-Muham mad, for whom this show is in effect a retrospective. In one image of a legendary Persian hero, Rustam Sleeping While Rakhsh Fights the Lion, there is a dazzling play between abstraction and observation.

A dozen kinds of flower and plant are faithfully recorded, petal by petal, while the rocks themselves take on the surging, crinkled look of brain coral, providing a dream landscape, almost subaqueous, in malachite green, pink and blue, woven to gether by the twisting trees. A tense springiness seems to run through every shape, visible in the arabesques of a bush no less than in the lashing tail of the lion or the trampling feet of the horse Rakhsh.

Pattern rules; it is extended every where. But unlike the more abstract coilings and loopings of Carolingian or Romanesque manuscript painting, it keeps returning the eye to the real world, if “real” is the correct term for this jeweled and infinitely elaborated ideal of nature.

In fact, there is practically no difference between culture and nature in these miniatures. Both are equally possessed, equally dominated. Witness the figures in Mirza-‘Ali’s miniature from the Quintet of _Nizami, Khusraw Listening to Barbad Playing the Lute; the young prince and his lackeys “have the same absolute and charmed formality as the room they sit in, with its green and blue and pink tiles, its delicate mural tracery and the mythical good-luck birds over the framing arch.

The basic principle of these miniatures is always clear: it is that time in making commands time in looking. The idea that “major” art must be big art is utterly refuted: what counts is the amount of concentrated imagination and craft the pages contain. Each im age is a trap, a condenser — time made visible.

Turned out by whole work shops of craftsmen working along with the master painter (each leaf could take months of labor), these miniatures may be the most self ish works of art ever created for a patron. They are mines of information about dress, manners and social ranking. But their point of view is so dauntingly one of absolute ownership that in studying them, one seems to be examining their world down the wrong end of a telescope. It is tiny, clear and unattainably remote — a place that no human ruler will ever enter again. — Robert Hughes