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

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

many ideas since then have proved to be outmoded. We shall, therefore, analyse only her reflections considering style.

24 According to her, the themes of the appliqué are akin to those of paintings by Mohammad!. Mohammad! is an important figure in sixteenth-century Persian painting, albeit one who is scarcely known. Art historians have been aware of him for a century now, but very little is known for sure concerning his works and especially his life. In any event, Basil Robinson has concluded - from laconic written sources, a few signed works and others attributable on the basis of these and, last but not least, from the painter's unusual, one-element name - that Mohammad! was the natural son of SolÇân Mohammad, the renowned head of the Tabriz ketäbkäne (libraryatelier), from the time of the artist's residence in Herat (1526- c.1530), and that he was legitimised by way of the Shi'ite institution of a temporary marriage {mot'a).

25 The late time of his birth and his lifelong residence in Herat deducible from his signed works attest to the fact that his father could not have played a part in his artistic formation. Conversely, Mohammad! exerted no influence on the Qazvin court painting of the mid-sixteenth century, but - obviously not unassisted - founded an individualistic Herat style that from many points of view - for example, by its preference for separate sheets - was a precursor of seventeenth-century artistic idiom. His was a career wholly different from that believed in the 1930s. Mohammad!'s influence may have emerged on account of the marks on the Budapest appliqué linking it to the Herat style, although at the time of the publication of the Survey the painter was still reconcilable not just with Herat, but also with northwest Persia, where Phyllis Ackerman localised the work. In a sense, a stylistic element akin to Herat art is the scene in the mirror, which does not illustrate any specific literary theme, but rather represents the generic image of a Persian royal feast. As a matter of fact, garden Capriccios, without narrative action and prepared on separate pages first appeared in the Herat painting of the mid-sixteenth century, among others signed works by Mohammad!.

26 While, however, in these paintings the action and composition are built exclusively by the free imagination of the painter, so far in Budapest it is a hierarchical, symmetrical picture structure that we have found, one in which the artist's intention is to prompt the viewer to read through the things depicted. Still more essential is the difference if, having accepted the intention, we perceive the unmistakeably court, even personalised character of the depiction, a factor completely alien to the Herat style.

27 The second stimulus in the direction of Mohammad! is much more concrete: it is the figure depicted in the cartouches of the inner bordure, a young qmlbäs reading under a tree (///. 4). Gombos found an analogy for this, a sheet in an album in St. Petersburg (SaltykovShchedrin Public Library, Dom 148 folio 70 recto, ///. 5), which, following Kerim Kerimov, he attributed to Solcän Mohammad.

28 The prince reading in the shade of a tree in blossom indubitably stands in close connection with the motif in question, indeed besides the figure of the table spreader discussed below this is the only case where we can point out an actual parallel between the appliqué and any work whatever. This theme was also depicted by the foremost seventeenth-century painter, Rezä 'Abbäs! (London, British Museum, OA 1920.917.0298/3, ///. 6), who added a note that it was made on the basis of Master Mohammad!'s original at a "propitious, noble and pure" royal command.

29 In a 1982 study, Robinson, in the wake of that inscription, assigned the one- or two-figure album paintings resembling the St. Petersburg work featuring the qmlbäs to Mohammadï's circle, dating it to around 1550.

30 The young man in Budapest shows the two paintings in a new light, namely in comparison with them it appears that the appliqué version pretty much contains motifs from both: with the earlier one it shares the featuring of the tree in blossom and the qmlbäs attire of the prince, and with Rezä's composition it has in common the motif of the leg nonchalantly draped over the knee, and the little book (safine) held together from two long, thin boards; this also