Preface

Roxburgh, David J.

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Preface

David J. Roxburgh

The Persian Album, 1400–1600

THIS BOOK is about albums—bound collections of calligraphy, painting, and drawing—assembled in Greater Iran between ca. 1400 and 1600 in the milieus of royal courts. Despite basic similarities of form and intention—to preserve and display—albums were conceptualized in widely different ways. Over time the...

Author

David J. Roxburgh

PublisherYale University Press

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00153.002

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15526

Preface

This book is about albums—bound collections of calligraphy, painting, and drawing—assembled in Greater Iran between ca. 1400 and 1600 in the milieus of royal courts. Despite basic similarities of form and intention—to preserve and display—albums were conceptualized in widely different ways. Over time the aesthetic conception of the composite page of albums underwent a dramatic change as additive processes of decoration and methods of reformatting produced new effects and signaled an unexpected attitude: album making came to be regarded as a creative endeavor, a process that transformed, completed, and perfected a collection of works of art. The content and scope of each album also vary widely. Some are consciously staged as histories of art (and introduced by art historical prefaces), and others are less inclusive in their medium or material (some albums contain only specimens of calligraphy in the “six cursive scripts”; others contain specimens in nastaʿlīq). Although albums were named collectively by one word, muraqqaʿ, this term masks a diversity of visual effect and content. In fact, it better connotes the process of making an album: the aggregation of loose materials into a permanent whole, what one album maker, Dust Muhammad, described in 1544–45 as a movement of works from the “region of dispersal into the realm of collectedness.” Before the term muraqqaʿ was applied to albums, it referred to a heavily patched cloth or to a cloak worn by dervishes or Sufis. The analogy between the historical materiality of a patchwork cloak—a physical and spiritual heirloom—and an album that incorporated the previously dispersed works by masters past and present developed through literary images perfectly evokes a process of creation by assembly and its aesthetic result.

Although Persian albums preserve works of art that are often at some remove from “normative” Persianate visual culture—normativity defined through the arts of the book and painting—the importance of albums is not only their salvage of unique or canon-breaking materials. Neither does their importance lie in filling a gap in studies of the history of collecting by shifting our view to a cultural zone sandwiched between Europe and East Asia. Simply put, Persian albums are of interest because they testify to the emergence and growth of a format of collecting and because the results of impulses to gather and arrange dispersed materials into fixed unities are still extant. The practice of album making, no less than the resulting albums, opens a window onto a landscape of thought about the history, artists, and media of the Persianate art tradition. Because the accumulated processes of album making constitute nothing less than an articulation of the principles of art and aesthetics, albums present—in a way equaled by no other art form in the Islamic lands—an opportunity to study such ideas from inside the artistic culture of premodern Iran.

Every album results from a series of deliberations, beginning with the selection of some works of art and the rejection of others, carried through to the arrangement of the chosen materials on each page and sometimes to the consideration of the sequence of the album as a totality. Although the shared codex form unifies albums, page layouts and total gatherings of folios configure a variety of orders in individual examples. That said, Persian albums have not been thought to hold such momentous promise. Such a perspective was preempted by notions inherited from the first generations of Western scholars to work on Persianate painting. To their eyes, the albums appeared to be disorderly, lacking any system or method of organization, and were reduced to a single category. Another problem derived from a recognition—often but an intuition—that some albums had been altered over time. To determine the “archaeology” of any specific example would require codicological analysis, a way of attending to the materiality of an object that has only become common in recent years. The importance of classifying Persian art into stylistic groups retained its central importance, postponing different approaches for later generations. The taxonomic priority of many historians of art did not discourage them from studying albums, however. But rather than study them as totalities, they studied their contents in piecemeal. Albums were little more than convenient storehouses of material.

The chapters in this book are built over a foundation of codicology, a method of analysis that has made it possible to isolate key phases in the history of a given album. Although the changing physicality of individual albums is of great significance, my primary interest is the first historical iteration of each album. Despite an overwhelming emphasis on the historical formation of albums, change, or its virtual absence, also figures as a topic of inquiry: whereas some albums are marked in ways that allow one to identify their movements, successive owners, or the changes made to them, others maintain their original physical state despite a culturally endemic tension between disaggregation and reaggregation. But the purpose of this book is neither to rehearse the codicological method nor to describe each album in detail. The results of codicology constitute a beginning place.

Each chapter entails some description of the materiality of each album, method of assembly, and contents, and these observations frame questions about the viewer’s experience of the single page and the corpus of folios as a totality. In this way, the inherent spatial properties of a codex can also be considered. I attend to the album as an image-bearing object, to its contents and making, and to a network of relations that link albums to contemporary cultural practices and systems of knowledge. From an ocean of albums, seven examples occupy a central place in this book. These examples—assembled for rulers, princes, and courtiers, or for the artists and calligraphers active at royal courts—were made in the political and cultural contexts of two principal dynasties that controlled the lands of Iran, the Timurids (1370–1507) and Safavids (1501–1722).

I studied materials in numerous cities. I would like to thank Hartmut-Ortwin Feistel (Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin); Julia Bailey (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston); Mary McWilliams (Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge); Elaine Wright (Chester Beatty Library, Dublin); Anne de Herdt (Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva); Filiz Çağman (Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul); Nazan Ölçer and Şule Aksoy (Museum of Turkish and Islamic Art, Istanbul); Meral Alpay (Istanbul University Library, Istanbul); Nevzat Kaya (Suleymaniye Library, Istanbul); Muhammad Isa Waley (British Library, London); Sheila Canby (British Museum, London); Stefano Carboni and Navina Haydar (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); A. D. S. Roberts (Bodleian Library, Oxford); Francis Richard (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris); and Massumeh Farhad (Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.). I especially appreciate the kindness of the staff at the library of the Topkapi Palace Museum. The Topkapi collection is unequaled, and this book would not have been possible without the encouragement of Filiz Çağman. I also had the good fortune to present my thoughts on albums to different audiences and recall the discussions chaired by Palmira Brummett (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) and Gabriel Martinez-Gros (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris).

To begin writing the book, I was awarded a J. Paul Getty Trust postdoctoral fellowship during a leave from teaching in 1999–2000 and, to complete it, a second leave in 2001–2. I am deeply grateful to Ioli Kalavrezou, then my department chair, and other colleagues, for supporting my second year away from teaching. I would like to express my gratitude to the ILEX Foundation for a generous photographic subvention that has made it possible to commission new color photography of materials in Istanbul; Hadiye Cangökçe expertly took the photographs. Other illustrations were funded by the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, Harvard University, and were shepherded into good order by Serena Tan and Erdem Çıpa. I also thank the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association for support in the publication of this book. I am equally indebted to attentive readers—Massumeh Farhad, Oleg Grabar, William Hanaway, Renata Holod, Linda Komaroff, Thomas Lentz, Gülru Necipoğlu, and Maria Subtelny—and to other colleagues who shared their expertise—Yve-Alain Bois, William Graham, Jeffrey Hamburger, Alice Jarrard, Cemal Kafadar, Neil Levine, Sophie Makariou, David Mitten, Bernard O’Kane, Jessica Rawson, Cynthia Robinson, Marianna Shreve Simpson, Priscilla Soucek, Wheeler Thackston, Houari Touati, Eugene Wang, Irene Winter, Elaine Wright, and Henri Zerner. Other friends provided encouragement and friendship, whether in Istanbul—Benjamin and Sarah Fortna, Tony Greenwood, Shirine Hamadeh, Semrin Korkmaz, and Lucienne and Doğan Şenocak—or during the hot summer in Cambridge when I wrote most of this book—Sean Keller and Kevin Luke. Bruce Fudge and Andràs Riedlmayer have helped me through difficult passages of Arabic and Ottoman Turkish. I am indebted to the staff at the New Haven office of Yale University Press. Patricia Fidler was an enthusiastic supporter of the book; Michelle Komie has supervised its many aspects of production; Laura Jones Dooley carefully attended to the editing of the text; Mary Mayer has coordinated design and production; and John Long has worked wonders with images delivered in a variety of formats. For the book’s design I have Leslie Fitch to thank and for its index Alex Trotter. Graduate students at Harvard University also deserve my gratitude, especially Ladan Akbarnia, Persis Berlekamp, David Drogin, Emine Fetvacı, Graham Larkin, Christine Mehring, Susan Merriam, Elizabeth Ross, and Scott Rothkopf. They have contributed to my thinking about albums in important, sometimes unexpected, ways. This book is dedicated to my sister and brother. Although they did not accompany me on my travels, they were always in my thoughts.

Note to the Reader: The transliteration system used in this book follows the International Journal of Middle East Studies, with some minor changes, for technical terms and passages extracted from Arabic, Persian, and Turkish sources. Technical terms appear in italics only in their first use. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are the author’s. Excerpts from the Qurʾan are from Al-Qurʾan: A Contemporary Translation by Ahmed Ali (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984). Most dates are given in the Common Era, though they are sometimes accompanied by dates in the Islamic calendar.

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