In case there were any connectivity issues, the title of my talk is The Future of the Past Poetry,
Portraiture and the Reception of Antiquity in a Tumour. And I'm going to be talking about the home of the brave time.
But before I start, I also want to acknowledge that I'm speaking from the see the land of the radical people of your urination in Sydney, Australia.
The content of this renowned book is a history decayed by the passage of time.
Ferdowsi has adorned a pleasant body, yet no life is contained in it.
It might seem out of place, but these verses, which describe the Shahnameh as an out of date, lifeless text,
appear in the middle of one of the most well-known 15th century copies of Ferdowsi's poem, the Shahnameh of Ibrahim Sultan.
This tension, this question is what led me to Oxford in twenty nineteen as about half a visiting fellow.
Many experts have written on the short term of our brain still time before.
So I hope that I can do their work justice in this short presentation.
But I'm concerned within this talk or some of the paintings from this manuscript and
a little studied accompanying poem that is not part of the text of the Shahnameh,
but was written for inclusion in the manuscript in the workshop of Ibrahim Sultan,
the Tamary prince, who between 14, 15 and 14 thirty five was the governor of Shiraz.
These paintings and the accompanying poem allow us to ask a range of questions from the reception of the Shahnameh as a work of
literature dealing with the ancient past to the meaning of portraiture and its correlation with historical self-awareness at the time.
Before I get to these questions, I'm going to walk you through the manuscript for a quick overview.
The Shahnameh of Ibrahim Sultan is not dated and lacks a colour phone, but the patient's name is recorded in several instances inside the manuscript.
We know that at some point in its after life, it travelled to India,
the likely place it was acquired by a cigarette ouseley and was later purchased by the Bodleian Library in eighteen fifty eight.
In nineteen fifty two, its illustrations and illuminations were removed and mounted in between glass sheets,
a fact that makes working with this manuscript as a whole very complicated.
So I'm incredibly grateful to colleagues at the podium who made this work possible.
I should also mention that the manuscript is fully digitised and accessible through the body and website.
So behind this cover, the manuscript opens its three double page.
Frontispiece is well,
these frontispiece have been heavily repainted and there are unanswered questions about the drawings on the reverse of these folios.
The double page illustrations have been hypothesised by several scholars as
patron portraits showing Ibrahim Sultan Erdan reception and enthronement scene,
as well as a haunting scene. And here you see the drawings on the back and a battle.
Then comes a process professor likely dated Lecky added post 16th century,
followed by the dedication Chamsai or Sunburst motif, which bears the name and titles of Ibrahim Sultan.
Another professor, the Abu Mansouri one, starts on the back of it with an illuminated heading.
A double page illuminated frontispiece marks the end of the process and contains again
titles of Ibrahim Sultan as well as the signature of the illuminator Nazareth's.
And that's just what I Tommy, who was the head of Ibrahim Sauternes Ottilia.
These are followed by another illuminator double page framing the opening verses of the text proper.
There are 42 paintings that illustrate the text of the Shahnameh and only two of them are full page in the
middle of the manuscript right before the section on the coronation of Lacross four pages of verses which,
as I mentioned, are not part of the shop I opened my presentation with and a double page illustration interrupt the text proper.
The painting shows Ibrahim Soltan holding court and the queen and her attendants watching a gardener at work on the other side.
So let me tell you a little bit about this accompanying poem.
The Maslova, this poem is a Maslova and is a panegyric in one hundred fifty seven verses on Ibrahim Zoltán,
written by 015 Ali as the historian when Shehab Ibrahim Sultan and the author of The Zeferino, or Book of Victories on the Life of Tadmore,
the poem starts with Praise of God and the Prophet Muhammad, followed by praise of Ferdowsi and his Sharhan imam,
then a section reflecting on the poem itself and the purpose of its composition,
leading to the longer section of the poem, which is concerned with the praise of Ibrahim Sultan.
The juxtaposition of the poem and this double page painting has helped the scholars to confirm earlier
hypotheses about this and other double page illustrations in this manuscript being Patrón Portraits.
But apart from the identification of the paintings protagonist as Ibrahim Sultan,
I want to explore what else the poem and paintings do as a coherent set.
The poem and a double page painting are inherently related to one another.
The verses of the poem are literally woven into the fabric of the painting so that the final lines of
the poem end on a panel running into the painting aligned with the enthroned ruler on the right side.
This text box is distinct from the floating text blocks in other paintings of this manuscript, not only from its positioning in the architecture,
but also the fact that instead of the words in black ink being written on the normal surface of the paper here on the panel and the right,
they're written against a painted surface similar to the white plaster covering the rest of the world around it.
These subtle details leave the viewer in no doubt that the calligraphic panel is part of the pain to the space,
that it belongs to the same spatial and temporal plane as the painting and the king.
Then read closely the poems, Praise of Abraham so often engages with several of the themes depicted in the paintings,
not just a double page painting that is directly juxtaposed vivid,
but also the three double page Frontispiece says in the beginning of the manuscript.
For instance, the poem praises the king's prowess in battle, noting his capacity to confront the heroes of the Shahnameh,
the resistance, the accuracy of this and the others, a similar metaphor is extended to his hunting skills.
Many of the king's attributes, such as his sword,
his helmet and his horse are invoked as allegories of his battle skills, but also his mental prowess and intellect.
And then an analogy between Ibrahim Sultan and the Cyprus,
a common symbol of the relationship between prosperity and it just through brings us to the garden side of the painting.
In the middle of the manuscript, the king is compared to a sapling under whose shadow justice grows in the garden of his kingship.
All the sultans are at his service rulers of regions near and far east and west coming to see him.
It is not that the poem is simply describing the paintings one after another.
Rather, it is taking visual cues from the paintings as it moves swiftly from one theme to the next,
turning those cues into metaphors that draw us a picture of Ibrahim and his virtues as an ideal king.
And as it does so, the poem touches on all of the archetypal Patrón from is the battle, the hunt,
the garden reception and the indoor Majelis or enthronement theme is that there
by Denn well-established iconography for Frontispiece portraits in the period.
The paintings, in the sense, act like a stage setting for the poem.
In its use of visual clues as a literary devices, the poem has an acrostic quality.
The double page painting of Palace and Garden epitomises this relationship towards the end of the poem,
after a hundred verses praising the qualities of the king, the poet announces a shift.
He says It's better for me to stay away from the king's combat and turn my
attention to his base because his reception is a universe of pomp and power.
The Majlis of the King is then described with a flood of allegories, benevolence is the cupper of the muchness generosity.
Is it Silverline, Felicity, its musician, happiness, its song, and so on and so forth.
The poem becomes like an allegorical painting. So what ultimately is the painting poems so doing in this manuscript,
the intended purpose of the set is explained in a short introduction that survives of spirit outside the home of Abraham.
So time and in the moonshot of Any Day, which is a compilation of letters, short text and poems from the 15th century.
This short introduction, not a decree from Ibrahim Sultan saying that a painting depicting his exalted Majlis
should go into the middle of some of the newly written copies of the Shahnameh.
And these verses, which would follow this introduction, were composed for the back of the painting.
There are several details in this short introduction that are worth noting, for instance,
the fact that the painting and the poem were meant to be inserted exactly in the middle of the manuscript and that this was not a one off unique case,
but was seen as a part of the broader project for Abraham Sultan's workshop.
More importantly,
the relationship between the poem and the painting here flips the notion of the primacy of text over image in an illustrated manuscript.
One of the purposes of the image is to narrate this story in the text image set that is sent here.
The image seems to have been the focus.
It comes first in the process of making, and the poem is written for its back in a very similar to the nature of epigraphy commission for objects.
This short introduction, however, does not fully explain what the text image set was devised for dad.
I will return to the poem itself,
specifically the first part of the poem where we find a reflection on the purpose of its composition and by extension, that of the painting.
After praising Ferdowsi and his magnum opus,
the poet laments that the economist suffers from archaism as a text devoted only to what once was and what once happened,
it's versus weirded out by the passage of time.
The poem personifies the Shahnameh as a lifeless body to insert life into it, the poet identifies the middle of the book,
its heart as the appropriate place for interpretation because the heart is home to the soul and the
soul that was to be inserted right in the middle of this lifeless body was the portrait of the prince.
The physical location of the portrait was inherent to its meaning and its efficacy.
Scholars in the past have noted the difference in the style of the paintings compared with the text illustrations in this manuscript,
the text illustrations are ones like the text.
Illustrations typically feature a few large figures against a simple background in the lack of surface details.
As you may note on the screen, this dramatic, minimalist effect is contrasted by the double page paintings with a more lyrical style connected
to both the Julia Reed and Herot paintings from the workshop of Ibrahim's brother by Songer.
A similar duality has been noted in this style of the manuscript's illuminations,
although the juxtaposition of different illumination styles in one manuscript was not uncommon in Shiraz at the time,
those before the start of the text proper that you see on top are connected with this style of Herat illumination of the time.
But those at the beginning of the alimentary process and the inserted poem by Ali as
D that you see at the bottom are connected to the muzaffer red and blue and gold.
She writes a style. This duality has been explained in terms of centre periphery politics, in other words,
the competitive relationship between Herat and Shiraz and the respective workshops,
as well as the mobility of artists moving between these two regions.
But some of these arguments still hold.
They don't fully explain the seemingly intentional juxtaposition of the styles in this manuscript, especially with regard to the illustrations.
Looking at the double page paintings together with the poem as a set, can shed some light on this duality.
The logic of Ibrahim Sauterne Charlemagne's intervention, as explained by the poem,
lies in the perception of history and its acknowledgement of temporal distance,
a fact that becomes especially prominent against the backdrop of the rise of tumed historiography in the viewpoint that the poem presents
us with a work of art as great as the Sharhan on that was is still a work of ancient past or distant past and needed to be revived,
had to be made contemporary. This was not a critique of the Shahnameh itself,
but what it had become as a result of historical dist. adopting textual and
visual strategies that were used to make the Shahnameh contemporary Rennard new.
Several prefaces were written on the topic and the text itself was edited or extended.
Its illustrations were filled with contemporary sources of inspiration.
And as a scholars have shown, there are several instances in which depictions of the Shahnameh as great kings and heroes,
conflated these characters with suggestive representations of contemporary ruling authorities.
But what distinguishes the intervention at hand here is that Ibrahim Sultanzoy Circle is adopting a different
way of describing the king into the lineage of ancient kings and heroes instead of being disguised as them,
the body of the king, or in other words, his portrait interrupts this lineage by virtue of its strategic position,
visual difference and a poem, the theorises that difference.
This interruption reads as a self-conscious reorientation of history to define one's relationship in history and its great works
of art required a visual intervention that bore an explicit mark of distinction from the past and occupied a liminal position,
both internal two and distinct from that history.
Thank you very much.