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

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

occurs on Rezä's portraits of scribes.

31 Accordingly, the solution visible on the appliqué has more to do either one of these works than they themselves have with each other. It shows that the craftsmen who designed the appliqué, the St. Petersburg painter and Mohammadï's work surviving in the transcription by Rezä stretch back to a common model, although none relates exactly to the others. Considering the fact that Mohammadï's paintings feature no qmlbäs headdress and that the red täj was getting increasingly out of favour in the 1550s, the St. Petersburg painting is presumably earlier and came into being in Tabriz rather than in Qazvin or Herat, in Mohammadï's circle. While the arrangement of the appliqué motif resembles Mohammadï's mid-century variation (known from Rezä), stylistically it very much harmonises with the Tabriz solution. The interpretation by Rezä is a seventeenth-century re-evaluation of a sixteenth-century archetype: the loosely bound turban and the faint brown clothing satisfied a changed fashion and the small feminine lips beneath the thick eyebrows a modified ideal of beauty. It is a pity that the model - by Mohammadï - is lost, since this could be an intermediate phase. This much, however, can be stated, namely which of the two compositions reflecting the earliest state the one in Budapest and the one in St. Petersburg -was made first. As we have indicated above, separate album sheets of a nonnarrative character - for example, the painting attributed to Solçan Mohammad by Kerimov were still very rare before the 1530s and 1540s; their heyday began only in the second half of the century. The Budapest figure, on the other hand, is not of this kind, since it remains merely an extra in the playing out of a large-scale drama. It must have been made at precisely the time when the process that shaped individual themes in book painting into autonomous art works had just begun. In this way in St. Petersburg the figure already complies with the change, but in Budapest it is still bound to the universal vision of the early Safavid period, and of the appliqué: in time, therefore, it precedes the painting. //. 2. The enthroned ruler Ackerman assumes, and Efendiev and Gombos are certain, that the main figure on the appliqué is Shah Tahmäsb I (1514-1576; reigned 1524-1576, ///. I)?

2 Perhaps it will never be possible to prove his identity, but there are good reasons to suspect it. Today the generally accepted view concerning "authentic" portraits of the ruler

33 is that they cannot be regarded as true likenesses, or even as official idealised portraits, i.e. their inscriptions are not original. When, however, we take into consideration the conventions for the depiction of rulers in manuscripts from the time of Shah Tahmäsb I, the dominant ideal of the age does indeed reveal itself: the confident qmlbäs prince beautiful in a child-like way, and the early Tahmäsb era becomes personified after all. Certain manuscripts refer to the fact that claimants of the throne - rival members of the royal family - may also have assumed this countenance and below we shall see a probable case of this (Sölten Mohammad: The Feast of Id in a Divan of Hafez). Thus, while the featuring of Shah Tahmäsb I seems to be reasonable, we cannot exclude with certainty that after his adolescence there were no others within the royal household who also could have been taken into account. Such a candidate could be the young Solçân Ebrahïm Mïrza (1540-1577), since in the 1550s and 1560s an atmosphere prevailed at his court in Mashhad that was similar to the one with his uncle in Tabriz two decades earlier, and it was in Mashhad art that the turbans were last provided with the red Safavid täj. Yet Soltän Ebrahïm Mïrza's artists - Sayk Mohammad, 'Alï Asgar and so on - gave up the canon of forms valid up until then, and overturning harmonic proportions, released bold, sensual luxuriance on the illustrated pages. It is interesting that some images in the 1556-65 copy of Abd al-Rahmän Jamï's Haft Awrang (Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC), the principal relic of Mashhad art, produce a patchwork effect surprisingly similar to the appliqué technique.

34 This is, however, just a superficial similarity: the approach leading to