The Oxford History of the Book by Raven James;

Author:Raven, James; [Raven, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2023-02-11T00:00:00+00:00

Deluxe Books with Illustrations

In the period between the late thirteenth century and the early seventeenth, especially in the lands where Persian was the literary language, artists and patrons transformed the book into a major medium of artistic expression in which paper and calligraphy were combined with illumination, illustration, and binding to produce some of the finest examples of book art made anywhere at any time. Although some earlier Arabic books had been illustrated, the main stimulus for this extraordinary development seems to have been increased contact with China and Europe, the result of transcontinental trade under the Mongols, who had conquered much of Eurasia in the early thirteenth century. The first illustrated books contained epic poetry and history, as such books became a means to connect the present with the past, both real and legendary, thereby helping to legitimize the Mongol rulers who lacked any Islamic authority, whether as descendants of the Prophet (the Shiʿi position) or as those elected by consensus of the community (the Sunni position).

Many of these books contained the Persian national epic, or Shāhnāma (Book of Kings). Around 1010, the poet Firdausi had collected stories that had been recounted orally for centuries into a 50,000-couplet epic. The earliest surviving manuscript of his text dates from two centuries later: an incomplete copy dated ah 614/1217 ce discovered in the National Library in Florence. The manuscript has fine illumination but no illustrations and is too polished to be the first example of the poem to have been written down, but the early written history of the epic is still debated.

Copies of the text proliferated c.1300. The finest—dubbed the Great Mongol Shāhnāma and probably made for the Mongols’ Persian vizier Ghiyath al-Din at Tabriz in the 1330s—exemplifies the new role of illustrated books in this period. Conceived as a monumental two-volume codex with some 300 folios, it probably had at least 200 illustrations, of which only fifty-eight are known to have survived, scattered in a handful of museums and collections around the world. Each full text page contains thirty-one lines of text in six columns within a written surface measuring 41×29 cm. The pages have been remounted but must have been significantly larger, probably folded in half from a full-baghdādī (110×70 cm) sheet of paper, the size standardized during this period and used for the largest thirty-volume copies of the Qurʾan penned by famous calligraphers who worked in tandem with named illuminators. The full-baghdādī sheets represent the limit of the mould a single paper-maker could lift from a vat. The sheets made during the Mongol period are also some of the finest, smoothest, and whitest ever produced, perfect surfaces for exquisite calligraphy, illumination, and illustration.

The paintings in the Great Mongol Shāhnāma generally occupy one-third to one-half of the written area, but appear much larger in conception and scale. They are some of the most dramatic renderings of these scenes known. For example, the one showing Alexander supervising the building of an iron wall to protect the civilized world from

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