The Making of the Artist in Late Timurid Painting

The first exploration of how artists represented artistic work and authorship in Persian painting

In the absence of a tradition of self-portraiture, how could artists signal their presence within a painting? Centred on late Timurid manuscript painting (ca. 1470-1500), this book reveals that pictures could function as the painter’s delegate, charged with the task of centring and defining artistic work, even as they did not represent the artist’s likeness. Influenced by the culture of the majlis, an institutional gathering devoted to intricate literary performances and debates, late Timurid painters used a number of strategies to shift manuscript painting from an illustrative device to a self-reflective object, designed to highlight the artist’s imagination and manual dexterity. These strategies include visual abundance, linear precision, the incorporation of inscriptions addressing aspects of the painting and the artist’s signature. Focusing on one of the most iconic manuscripts of the Persianate tradition, the Cairo Bustan made in late Timurid Herat and bearing the signatures of the painter Bihzad, this book explores Persian manuscript painting as a medium for artistic performance and self-representation, a process by which artistic authority was shaped and discussed.

Key Features

• The first book-length study of artistic self-reflection in Islamic art
• Expands artistic self-representation beyond self-portraiture to consider how the artist could be represented through the symbolic possibilities of the medium
• Explores the relationship between Persian painting, historical modes of visual experience at the majlis and conceptions of authorship in art historiographical writings
• Examines a series of hitherto unstudied features of Persian painting, including the representation of epigraphic inscriptions and the painter’s signature
• Provides the first complete analysis of one of the most important manuscripts in the history of Persianate book arts, the Cairo Bustan