Imagine you are in sixteen century Iran, at the peak of Iranian manuscript making and miniature painting. Envision a classroom with small children, seated cross-legged on mats with drawing boards balanced on one knee and surrounded by little shells of ink and colors.

Endlessly, they copy their master’s formula for dragons, flowering trees, elegant princesses or stout-hearted
warriors slaying horrifying demons.

Apprentices have to discover the properties of each hue, both separately and in conjunction with all the rest to ensure the purity and intensity of colors. To the Iranian miniaturist the palette not only forms a visual “chord,” like a cluster of musical notes, but can also be enjoyed bit by bit.

Those days the training of a painter began early and was extremely thorough. Even Shah Tahmasp (Safavid dynasty), a gifted amateur whose surviving works are skillfully painted and delightfully amusing, must have
toiled considerably to master an extremely demanding craft. For the professional, such training was yet more rigorous. In addition to mastering his art he would have to also learn the essential social graces (i.e. Iranian literature, horsemanship, courtly etiquette, etc.), and learn to make brushes from kittens’ or baby squirrels’ hair tied into quill handles, to pulverize pigments, to prepare binding media, to use gold and silver paint, and much more. Far more important were lessons in drawing, a fundamental requirement for all painters.

Close observation of Safavid manuscripts shows that aspiring young artists contributed to them in minor ways, such as laying in flat areas of color. As their skills developed, more demanding (and interesting) tasks were
assigned to them.



At the age of seventeen or so, a particularly able apprentice might be given the task of coloring a whole miniature designed – or to use their term “qalamgiri” outlined – by a master. This must have been a trying role for eager young artists who toiled for months on pictures that were credited to the master artists, whose work had taken far less time. In due course, however, the novices became masters; and it was then their turn to train
a further generation by assigning to them instructive if menial tasks.

For an Iranian artist of the sixteenth century, the peak of worldly success was recognition at the Shah’s court
and membership in the royal workshop, a virtual magnet to which exceptional artistic talents were drawn. If an apprentice painter in Shiraz revealed extraordinary ability, he was likely to be hired away from the bazaar workshop by the local governor, who would before long offer him to the Shah in the hopes of currying favor.
Thus young men of great talent rose, like cream to the top of the milk bottle. Even the most humbly born in Safavid Iran could reach great heights.

At least one imperial artist, Sayavush the Georgian, began as a slave boy captured during one of the Shah’s western campaigns. Gifted as an artist, he was apprenticed to the royal ateliers and eventually became one of Iran’s major painters. The position would also have given him entrée to the imperial court, where the position of an artist, like everything else in Safavid Iran, depended upon the Shah’s will.

Aqa Mirak, one of the leading artists, particularly noted for his imperial portraits, was a boon companion of the Shah. Sultan- Muhammad, who was unquestionably the greatest of the Shah’s artists, was less personally close to his master, though professionally he was even more warmly admired. His son, Mozaffar Ali, was one of the leading Safavid painters of the second generation, and his particular gift was to record the psychological interplay of the Safavid nobility, no doubt the result of his years of intimate association with the court.

While the joys of creative ecstasy were the artists’ greatest rewards, they also needed more tangible sustenance. In this respect, his earnings were commensurate with those of other members of the Shah’s
establishment – his military officers, musicians, butlers, and equerries. Like them, he received a salary as well as occasional bonuses, depending of course on his patron’s enthusiasm. If a particularly exciting miniature was offered to the Shah when he was in a generous mood, the artist might be favored with a richly embroidered coat of honor, a jeweled dagger, or even a village and the surrounding farmland.

But, if the artist earned his royal master’s disfavor, he could expect terrible punishment. The Shah was not Iran’s only leading patron. While employed at the court, royal artists augmented their incomes by illustrating humbler manuscripts for government officials or rich merchants; and if an artist lost favor with the Shah, he could either find employment at one of the commercial centers, such as the bazaars of Shiraz, or he could emigrate.

During the sixteenth century, eager rivals at the courts of Ottomans, Uzbeks, and Mongols, and the sultans of
Deccan, vied with the Safavids for men of talent. Perhaps the most characteristic element in Iranian painting is its use of arabesque, the rhythmic designs based upon flowering vines that invigorates and unifies all Islamic art.

Like a pulse, the reciprocal rhythms of this ornamental system suffuse and unify all Iranian compositions. Without it, these paintings would be as unthinkable as an orchestra playing a suite without rhythm. With it, they are the visual equivalents of poetic verse. The composition of arabesque and miniature paintings, illustrating poems or stories, made magnificent manuscripts. These manuscripts were made to delight.



To touch, gaze upon, or read, even to smell and hear the gentle rustle of their folios, are pleasurable experiences. Connoisseurs of craftsmanship as well as of art can find much among their pages and bindings
to astound and instruct. When these volumes were being created whole workshops shared in the projects: makers of paper; specialists who burnished and cut the folios; others who measured and penned the razorsharp
rulings of the margins and colored and gilded them; experts who adorned chapter headings and other important passages with interlaces of arabesque and geometrical ornament in gold ink and color; artisans who spent
their lives selecting and grinding pigments, most of which were made by pulverizing minerals such as gold, silver, lapis lazuli, and malachite – though some were derived from soils and secretions of beetles; chemically
minded “scientists” who cooked up the binding media in secret (and still today kept secret) formulae of glues and, possibly, oils; lacquer and leather craftsmen who painted and tooled the sumptuous bindings; and librarians who supervised all these activities over the years that were needed to fashion a great book.

One cannot but be impressed by this small army of bibliophiles. And we have not yet listed the most crucial figures, the patrons, calligraphers, and artists – not to mention the authors of these literary classics. The art of the miniature paining reached its zenith during the Safavid era but its strong roots lie in earlier eras following the Moslem Arab conquest of Iran. For a number of centuries Mongol, Tatar and Turkish forces overran Iran in
turn.

First they were infidel invaders but eventually they adopted Islam and the Iranian way of life. Ultimately they became “the Defenders of the Faith and the Homeland.” They all loved the Holy Book, the Quran and paid a great deal to artists who could produce delightful copies. In as much as they spent much of their lives in tents from which they hunted and fought, rather than in palaces, bulky possessions had little appeal to them. Their book collections, as a result, were often portable galleries of small masterpieces.