This book covers the illustrated works in Persian that form a portion of the Islamic material in the collection of Bernard Berenson (1865–1959). Chiefly known as an authority on the art of Renaissance Italy, Berenson left his collection, his library, and his villa I Tatti near Florence, to Harvard University. The Persian pieces comprise four separate folios and three manuscripts. They were brought to notice by Richard Ettinghausen (Persian Miniatures in the Bernard Berenson Collection, Milan, 1961), with further extended attention from Gauvin Alexander Bailey in two articles (Oriental Art, 47/4, 2001 and 48/1, 2002). The present book follows an exhibition in the United States in 2017.
The first essay is of general import: an account of the Berenson collection by Ayşin Yoltar-Yıldırım with particular attention to the enthusiasm for Islamic material in the years 1910 to 1914. This is supplemented by Priscilla P. Soucek with emphasis on the importance of the Munich exhibition of 1910, Meisterwerke muhammedanischer Kunst. The final Appendix is again general: Katherine Ermin, Penley Knipe and Maille Radford discuss the pigments used throughout, and, employing X-ray florescence and Raman spectroscopy, produce a table that will clearly be used for reference.
Three separate paintings are discussed by Eleanor Sims. First, “Isfandiyar reproaches his father, Gushtasp” from the Great Mongol Shāhnāmah, considered to date from the 1330s. In situating this picture Sims gives an extensive account of what is known of the dispersed parent manuscript and the literary significance of the moment depicted. In visual description, she focuses on elements that owe their presence to the Mongol overlordship of the period, textiles that reflect what was available in Tabriz at the time, mixing Chinese motifs with the Arab tradition of lettered ṭirāz. She follows Ettinghausen in noting the wall paintings in strongly Chinese mode, and suggests that, as in landscape scenes from the manuscript, trees in these may symbolize the situation of the characters – in support, it may be mentioned that the tree growing in the garden behind the throne of Gushtasp appears very robust. In an essay later in the book Sims continues her discussion of the history of Shāhnāmah illustration in connection with a picture in “Commercial Turkman style”, datable to the 1490s, “Kay Ka'us crowns his grandson, Kay Khusrau”.
Sims also discusses a work of intermediate date, “Timur receives guests at the wedding of his son Jahangir” from the Ẓafarnāmah of 1436. She gives a full account of the parent manuscript and other work for Ibrahim Sultan, but does not enter into the question of continuing patronage after Ibrahim's death in 1435, when illustration of the manuscript may not yet have started. Sims again touches on the symbolism of background elements: a tall day-lily is seen as representing fecundity, though it could also imply kingly splendour, while the entwined trees in the rear could evoke the future couple.
The Berenson Timurid Anthology, copied in Herat in 1427, and generally attributed to the patronage of prince Baysunghur, is represented in three essays. First, Mario Casari makes the case for the importance of content: the Anthology is composed of seven treatises of different periods which, in a courtly structure of allegory and symbolism, discuss philosophical and mystical matters. Second, David J. Roxburgh introduces the calligrapher Muhammad ibn Husam “Shams al-Din al-Sultani”, and covers calligraphy, painting and illumination, with an Appendix for translations of colophons. The material is anatomized but the reader might be glad to have it re-integrated: the austere captions, though providing folio numbers, do not indicate in which treatise illuminations and illustrations belong. Roxburgh is careful to point out that Baysunghur's name does not appear, but passes lightly over what is evidently portraiture of that prince, as first recognized by Ettinghausen. The third essay, an account of the conservation of the manuscript by Katherine Beaty and Penley Knipe, reveals a considerable history of interventions of various sorts over time.
A Safavid Shāhnāmah is discussed in articles by Lâle Uluç and Farhad Mehran severally. By comparison with five manuscripts that exhibit some similar features Uluç convincingly attributes this to the second quarter of the sixteenth century in Shiraz, at the shrine of a holy man, Husam al-Din Ibrahim. She also notes the names of two artists: Mahmud Muzahhib and ʿAli ibn Muhammad al-Mashhadi. Uluç particularly mentions the pale palette of the illustrations – to which may be added a predilection for mid-pink and mauve. Though some skies are ornamented with the busy cloud motifs of so-called “illuminator style”, geometric detail in architecture is not always very accurate. Mehran's article is a fine demonstration of what a rigorous statistical approach to the text can produce. Weighing additions, omissions and the use of chalīpā (hemistiches on the diagonal), he shows that at least 26 of the 32 narrative illustrations appear to result from a change of mind during the making. He also confirms that dīv (demon) body-parts seen in “Rustam rescues Bizhan from the pit” can be explained as deriving from an interpolation that accords to Rustam an extra exploit in which he defeats the son of Akhvan dīv.
Vahshi's Farhād va Shīrīn is again treated in two articles. Chad Kia introduces the text, noting its unfinished state. Illuminating his points with quotations, he describes a view of human emotions that departed from previous conventions. Kia also mentions a Mughal note of 1618, which provides a terminus ante quem for the production. Discussing the manuscript, Melis Taner follows a rather imprecise path among descriptions, comparisons and dating.
Laura E. Parodi has many new things to say and writes with welcome clarity: her topic is a Mughal album leaf. The attribution of its pictorial verso of kneeling sages to the fifteenth-century painter Bihzad was already discounted by Ettinghausen; Parodi argues cogently for an origin in Shibanid Bukhara. Still mindful of the significance of Bihzad to the Mughals, Parodi turns to the folio's calligraphic verso, and posits a reconstructed sequence of pictures and verses over four folios, three known and one putative, which will modify future understanding of album-making.
