Szilágyi András (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 22. (Budapest, 2003)

Iván SZÁNTÓ: Reflections on the Origins of the Persian Appliqué from the Esterházy Treasury

instead assign both to the years between 1530 and 1540 (Canby considers the two-figure work to be later). It was at this time that the wave of experimentation might have begun that, through the development of duplicating techniques, resulted in cheaper paintings that were "more mobile" than manuscripts. These works represent an intermediate phase in the gradual development leading from the illustrated manuscript to the subjective improvisations of Mohammad!, when as an initial step characters of traditional scenes were reincarnated in exact copies in the framework of an album, or moraqqa'

. The same environment gave birth to the analogies of the appliqué that were discussed earlier, the Prince Reading and the "Tahmäsb portraits"; the many points of agreement can hardly be coincidental. //. 4. Safavid painting and the designers of the appliqué The many golden ages of Persian painting would belie the claim that the Safavid period stands out as the solitary peak, but it is indubitable that the chief works of this time rank among the finest in world art. In truth, it is correct to look on it not as a homogenous unity linked to the dynasty (1501-1722), but as a turning point in two long - dynasty-spanning periods and to divide it in two. In the first part the development of classical Persian painting reached its end, while in the second the germs of modern Persian painting came into being. Perhaps it will not be unprofitable to recall the antecedents of the turn, for the definition of the historical place of our artefact. The classical Persian painting tradition was, roughly speaking, in force for three centuries. Fourteenth-century artists in the service of the Mongol court of Persia accumulated, in experimenting and assimilating works, its subsequent conventions, selecting the most deserving literary works for illustration, and establishing the court workshop (ketäbkäne) in Tabriz (in northwest Persia), from where generations of artists over the next centuries transplanted the formulated canon to subsequent courts. The canon became solidified at the time of the fifteenthcentury ruling houses, the Jalä'irids, the Timurids and the Turkomans, and later deepened in the cultured milieu of late Timurid Herat, under the hand of, among others, Kamal al-Dïn Behzäd, the most famous Persian painter. When, by 1510, Shah Esma'ïl I (15011524) had reunited Persia within the Safavid Empire created by him, there were two outstanding artistic centres in the country: Herat and the capital, Tabriz. It was no wonder that early Safavid art included the classical traditions developed in these, especially through the active patronage of Shah Tahmäsb I, who was the son and heir of the empire's founder. Shah Tahmäsb spent his childhood in the cultivated city of Herat, and was himself no minor master at painting, since he had been taught by Behzäd himself, whom - probably in 1522, when he returned to the capital - he lured to Tabriz, to promote the synthesis of the two styles there. The art of the early Safavids, then, followed organically from earlier developments. Later Safavid painting, however, broke with these, but when exactly the turning point occurred is questionable. It is clear that the great modernizer of Persia, Shah 'Abbäs I (1587-1629), and his court, while centralizing the state apparatus and regulating architectural forms effectively, found the artistic language of painting already broken up into stylistic layers, and attempted, to no avail, to return to the classical tradition.

42 Around 1600, the shah's orders for manuscript illustrations recalled Herat classicism. Afterwards his interest in the genre diminished, and the way was opened to the sensual youths and poor people of the painter Rezä, and through them to modem Persian painting. The transition period took place in an interregnum between the prevalence of the two types, the traditional manuscripts and the novel separate leaves. We see the first stages of this in the figures raised to a separate theme by means of pouncing, and on other album paintings, which must have been made in the 1540s at the latest. Of course, these early experiments remained well behind the classical genres, with the spread of the new genre strengthening only around Solçan Ebrahïm Mïrza and, later, in