OK, I hope everybody can see the slides clearly, can hear my voice.
So, yes, just briefly to start with the Bodleian Library corpus of manuscripts made for Prince Caraco.
You know, the borderlands, in fact,
quite rich in an overall body of what was quite a prolific production of manuscripts between during peer production,
relatively short career, only ten years from fourteen fifty six to 14, 16.
He was governor in Shiraz on behalf of his father, John Shaw, but then showed signs of insubordination.
He was moved to Baghdad in fourteen sixty to sixty one and then finally brought on his
father's wrath upon him in fourteen sixty six where he died at the orders of his father.
So quite a short and fiery career, if you like.
But during that period, he was the patron of a large number of absolutely exquisite manuscripts, many of which were made in Shiraz and very usefully.
David Roxborough has in an essay entitled Many Wishes to Death Essays in Honour of Renata Holland has catalogued a great many of those manuscripts.
His mentions about 14 with dedications to pay and a great many more without dedications.
And of course, anyone who watches the sale rooms will notice that in the last two years,
both Sotheby's and Christie's have had the most magnificent copies of baduk manuscripts up for sale.
So I didn't have time to look deeply at all of the manuscripts during my poetry and fellowship.
But I there's one one left that I would like to look at in more detail.
But the ones that I managed to spend a lot of time with this wonderful copy here, you see of the must not be of Jalaluddin Rumi.
It's a large, hulking, beautiful manuscript, very popular.
And it's been on many, many levels in exhibitions.
And here we see an image of the one of the two opening, she says, with a dedication to people dark in the middle.
And one of two very ornate front pieces on the left of both of these have been heavily restored during the early 19th century of late 18th century.
So somewhere between seven, between seventeen ninety eight to eighteen fourteen, they came into the hands of Circle Ouseley in India.
And it seems at that time the front pages on the back page were very, very heavily restored.
And that in itself creates some very interesting findings.
The other manuscripts that I've looked at in some detail is this group of three exquisite little Sophina,
the very small political speech, pretty much identical in layout and orientation.
They each measure only about 16 centimetres by eight centimetres.
And the most famous of all. Sorry, I hope that's better.
I forgot to put my speaker thing front. To be the most famous of all is only one four zero.
That comes from the collection of Syckel. His brother William.
And this is. Possibly the earliest illuminated copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khyam, it's very famous, of course, because it was one of the, I think,
two manuscripts that was consulted by Edward Fitzgerald when he penned his very famous English version of the book by it,
but not quite so famous, therefore not designated Precious as yet, what I call it brothers.
So there are two other manuscripts.
One is contains quatrains by Cachay and some of them, and the other, interestingly, A, does the number of misery Kohistani.
And at some point I think it would be wonderful if somebody did a study of products choice literature,
somebody more erudite in literature than I hope.
But these are very similar in format.
They have been published by David Roxborough and they've also been mentioned by Elaine right in the look of the book.
So I was looking at the, as Francesca said, the materiality of these books, how they were structured,
how they were originally designed, the layout involving a lot of measurements.
But also I have the great pleasure of looking at what are possibly some of the finest illuminations of the period,
quite distinctive and slightly different from the classical by some gaudy illuminations.
And to try and decipher how these designs that evolved and how they were put together.
As we can see, we've got three examples of illuminations from the something this very famous SHAMSUL
opening shots from the report of the more Payam with its title in The Star in the Centre.
This is absolutely my new I've got my see the diagram in the next one, but I think it's about three centimetres across.
Here is a colourful illumination from the side of caution from al-Qaida.
And the one on the right is a beautiful GNR page from the dust or monomer of misery.
Bustani One of the pleasures of this has been looking at illuminations that rarely see the light of day,
partly because most of the manuscripts opens at the most obvious front pages when they're on display,
but with no hint of the treasures that lie within the third manuscript of the.
And of course, porpoise is a form of love.
This, again, in fact, came much earlier to the collection via the phrase the collection.
So it was, again, quite possibly in India because the findings are Indian, but it has arrived in excellent condition, pretty much unretouched.
I haven't had a chance to look at it in great detail,
but I was absolutely stunned when opening the the covers of the first volume to see that the restorers who
found it had in fact saved the original Douglas in bindings of the original findings are the first to go,
unfortunately. But here is a magnificent example of filigree leather work over a thick layer of lapis lazuli pigment.
And I can't wait to get my hands on that in the near future.
A little bit about how I work in order to understand the material and how these manuscripts will were made.
The first stage is to look at the manuscripts in great detail, page by page, looking at the the the format,
the layout, the quality of paper, and also to make these very detailed drawings in the study of.
This is something you can't get from photography.
You need your eyes to see changes of mind and things that maybe have been restored as opposed to original book.
So all these spidery notes and diagrams translate into what I hope are some more sensible diagrams.
And I hope in the long run will give us some information about how the original ateliers, which again,
think of them as US institutions with directors, a bit like Pixar Studios, a lot of artists and directors working together.
So the whole book would have been carefully planned from the beginning, starting with the format of the text,
looking at how much space the text would take, how large the calligraphers hand has to be, and the structure of the poetry.
This is a recreation of the layout of the mustafi of Rumi and because of the dignity of the work, according to Elane.
Right. The the the work itself, the poetry itself in many ways governs the format of the the text covers.
So in this case, the mustafi is generally given quite a generous, wide format text,
which creates quite a large book, and it's divided into these columns for each of the lines of the poetry.
So this is worked out first. And what they did was to make a template that would be preserved throughout the entire book.
So it's a bit like the type setting of a modern publisher.
This template was made of carved and strung with string with both columns and the lines.
What happens is that the entire book is cut.
The papers cut into folios and the entire entirety of the folios are placed over this
and robbed by some poor guy who has the job of rubbing the paper over the MISTERA,
which creates an impression. And this is then used first to line up the text panels and then by the scribe to write the poetry.
Now we actually can see the MISTERA impressions.
And here is the last page of one of the small poetry books, ouseley one 14.
And you can see very clearly at the very end the back page.
This is the first of the colourful and you can see the Mr. Marx.
These are originals. So it's quite wonderful to see these.
So accordingly, I put through these manuscripts through the same treatment,
measured up their layout, and the mistera made us a recreation of a mistera.
And sure enough, all the text and all the illuminations are centred on the mistera.
Now, one of the reasons you see the champs is always look a bit cross-eyed when
there's two of them is because they're centred on the centre of the mystery,
not the centre of the folio.
So because it's normal for the outer margins to be, why doesn't that the margins you see that most of the elements are pushed towards the centre,
towards the gutter of the book of the things that were absolutely fascinating when looking at these.
This is the dustier Noma is the the the line drooler or the chockful, as it's called, would then use the mistera impression to rule the text panels.
But they didn't rely entirely on the mystery question.
They also measured it and make these tiny little pinpricks.
I don't know if you can actually see it, but there's a little pinprick there or you can see my Close-Up.
And a little pinprick here and the same in all of the the the rulings, if you look very closely,
you see the corners and the intersections, little tiny pinpricks that were used as a guide.
Now it seems that the black lines were ruined first and then the gold filled in later.
So here we have some of my most beautiful nostalgic calligraphy.
He would have been the next to do his work. And generally the lines start by slightly overshooting the double black border.
We can see that the gold was put in later, because you can see that the gold.
It's worked round the actual writing, and here the gold slightly overshot the end of that figure.
It also gives you a lot of insight as to how the Illuminati works.
So this oops, sorry, this close up here is a corner of this gorgeous illumination at the end.
And you can see how loosely and fluidly the artist worked, first with gold and then with these very calligraphic outline.
So it's very exciting to see this because you can actually see the hand of the artist.
There are more clues about how the Illuminatus worked.
These illuminations are magnificent and they tend generally to be associated with the stripe shape mood.
Who was given the Knispel people? Dr Hollingworth looked up and I sometimes wonder if it was him who actually also did the nation's.
It's not unusual for a scribe, a master calligrapher to also be a master illuminator.
We can see that there are guidelines that were used to help illuminate with his work.
So here on the chapter heading of the ouseley one three one,
we can see a guide line up here scored with the Burin to indicate the upper extent
of the rays that extend up from the freeze of the farm or chapter headings.
Here again, looking at the front shamsul, you can see there is another guideline.
It's inscribed with a burin but attached to a compass.
And sure enough, there's a compass point in the middle.
Now this this shows us that the illuminators actually draughted the design straight onto the folio.
They didn't draught it on another piece of paper and then transferred.
All of this work is done straight onto the folio, draughted from scratch.
And then all of the manuscripts. I have seen many, many examples of these so-called guide lines, even when this fairly complex geometric structures.
We also had a look at pigments and here I was very privileged to have the collaboration of
my colleague Marinika Stiglitz and John Howard's and Conservation and heritage science.
In fact, I've I've had the pleasure of working with the conservation team on the pigment research prior to this.
So it's very exciting to have this is a continuation here.
We've got I'm sorry to interrupt, but you have reached the end of your time.
I'm very sorry. OK, well, last minute.
So here we have some closeups of the colours and we can see this beautiful quality of lapis lazuli.
And here in the centre is the great big compass point that comes in the centre of this panel.
Thank you very much. I'm sorry that I've overshot.
So let me come out now and to.