Art in the Service of Power
Throughout the Islamic world, from Granada to Delhi and Samarkand, kings and nobles set geniuses and slaves to work building mosques and tombs, painting tiles and firing them in kilns, weaving silks and carpets with patterns, hammering metal, carving wood and ivory and illuminating manuscripts with thin colors and delicate lines. The Ilkhans, Timurids, Ottoman sultans, Egyptian Mamluks and even minor dynasties that ruled small parts of Islam all followed the Eastern tradition of blending and tempering plunder with poetry and killing with art. In village and city palace alike, wealth gradually took the form of beauty, and a minority of the prosperous could enjoy luxury objects that tempted the hand and cheered the eye.
The Mosque as a Treasury of Arts
The mosque was still the treasury of Islamic arts. In it brick and tile gave minarets their rhythm, while portals faced with imitation-porcelain tiles broke the sun's light into brilliant colors. The pulpit offered carved lines or delicate inlaid wood, the splendor of the mihrab drew worshippers' eyes toward Mecca, metal grilles and bronze lamps offered fine tracery in praise of God, patterned carpets softened the tiled floor under the knees of the prostrate, and fine silks covered illuminated copies of the Quran.
At Tabriz Clavijo was amazed by "beautiful mosques decorated with blue and gold tiles". At Isfahan a vizier of Oljeitu raised in the Friday Mosque a mihrab in which ordinary stucco became a captivating composition of arabesques and architectural lettering. At Soltaniyeh Oljeitu built a magnificent mausoleum (1313) and intended to move to it the remains of two Shiite imams, Ali and Hussein. The plan was never carried out and the khan's own bones were laid in that imposing place. The ruins of a mosque at Varamin hint at its former grandeur (1326).
Timur the Builder
Timur loved building and seized plans and architectural innovations from his victims like silver and gold. Like other conquerors he loved massive structures as a symbol of imperial power and his own will, and like a newly risen man he loved color and carried decoration to excess. Captivated by the blue tilework of Herat, he took Persian tilers to Samarkand to cover the surfaces of his capital's mosques and palaces with smooth, glossy tiles, and the city soon shone with glazed pottery.
In Damascus he noticed a dome with an onion-shaped base that narrowed gradually upward to a point. He ordered his architects to record its plan and dimensions before it could be destroyed in war. He adorned Samarkand with such domes and spread the style to India and Russia, as the Taj Mahal at Agra and the church of St Basil on Red Square show, the book claims. When he returned from India he brought so many artists and craftsmen that in three months they built him the "Shah Mosque", a huge building with a splendid entrance 30 meters high and a great roof supported by 480 stone columns.
He built a mosque and tomb for his sister, which counts as the masterpiece of his reign's architecture. When he ordered a mosque to honor his chief wife, Bibi Khanum, he supervised it personally, tossing meat to the laboring workers and gold coins to the diligent craftsmen, encouraging or threatening them all to work feverishly, until the onset of winter stopped construction and cooled his architectural fire.
The Masterpiece at Mashhad
Timur's successors produced more refined art. In 1418 Gawhar Shad, the capable wife of Shahrukh, commissioned the architect Qawam al-Din to build the Gawhar Shad Mosque at Mashhad, on the road from Tehran to Samarkand. It is the most magnificent and richly decorated product of Islamic architecture in Iran. Minarets with fine balconies stand guard over the shrine, and four splendid portals join the entrance to the central courtyard. Their surfaces are covered with imitation-porcelain tiles that "were never made like them, neither before nor after".
It is a brilliant scene of color that, unharmed by time, forms hundreds of geometric patterns, arabesques and floral motifs with rhythmic Kufic inscriptions, all doubled by the glow of the Iranian sun. In the northwest of the complex, above the "portico of the shrine", a dome covered in blue tiles rivals the sky, and along the portal's rim, large white letters on a blue ground proclaim the devout queen's endowment. The inscription says that the queen, the sun of heaven, built this great congregational mosque from her own property, for a good end and the welfare of the hereafter, in the reign of Sultan Shahrukh, lord of the kings of Arab and non-Arab lands, and prays that God make his kingdom eternal and increase his goodness, justice and generosity to the world.
The Gawhar Shad Mosque was only one of the many buildings that made Mashhad the Rome of the Shiite sect. Pilgrims and worshippers of Imam Reza, over thirty generations, created a magnificent complex that dazzles the eye: graceful minarets, imposing domes, portals covered in glittering tiles or decorated with silver and gold plaques, and wide courtyards where mosaic or imitation-porcelain tiles on the surrounding walls and portals answer the sun's greeting. All of it forms a wonderful ensemble of color and design, so that Persian art could honor the imam with its magic and rouse the zeal of faith in the pilgrims.
Mosques of the Turks
From Azerbaijan to Afghanistan thousands of such mosques grew out of the soil of Islam, for the pull of religion is as valuable to man as the fruit of the earth. For us in the West, prisoners in our molds of thought, these shrines can be empty names. What does it matter to us that the chaste bones of Gawhar Shad were laid in a beautiful tomb at Herat, that Shiraz rebuilt its congregational mosque in the fourteenth century or that Yazd and Isfahan added splendid mihrabs to their Friday mosques? We are too far away in time, place and thought to grasp such greatness, just as the worshippers in those mosques cannot grasp the soaring aims of Gothic architecture or the formal beauty of Renaissance sculpture.
Still, even standing before the Blue Mosque of Tabriz (1437–1467), recalling its past fame for the shine of its blue imitation-porcelain tiles and golden arabesques, we feel a pleasing excitement. We should not forget that Mehmed the Conqueror and Bayezid II built mosques in Constantinople (1463–1497) no less grand than Hagia Sophia. The Ottoman sultans took their ground plans from the Byzantine empire, their portals from Iran, their domes from Armenia and their decorative motifs from China to build mosques at Bursa, Nicaea, Nicomedia and Konya. It may be said that, at least in architecture, Islamic art was still at the height of its progress.
Calligraphy and the Miniature
Only one delicate art could stand up to the grandeur of Islamic architecture, like David against Goliath. Perhaps even more esteemed than the builders of mosques were the masters of calligraphy and the patient miniaturists who wrote manuscripts with the most painstaking detail and illuminated them. Wall paintings were also common then, but none survive. Portraits were also painted in oil, and a few remain. The Ottoman sultans appeared to follow the strict religious prohibition on making likenesses found in scripture and the Quran. Yet Mehmed the Conqueror took the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini to Constantinople (1480) to make his portrait, which now hangs in the National Gallery in London. There are also a number of imitation paintings said to be copied from original portraits of Timur.
In general, the Mongols who converted to Islam preferred the pictorial traditions of China to the prohibitions of Islam. Through them, images such as the dragon and the cage, cloud forms and halos around saints, and moon-round faces passed from Chinese painting into Persian miniature, and combined with Persian transparent colors and flowing lines to produce a developed and creative style, since the two traditions were closely akin. Chinese and Persian miniaturists alike painted for aristocrats of refined taste and so aimed to please the imagination, not to reproduce visible nature.
The main centers of Islamic miniature painting in this period were Tabriz, Shiraz and Herat. The fifty-five pages found from the so-called Demotte copy of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh were probably painted by a number of miniaturists and illuminators of Tabriz under the Ilkhans in the fourteenth century. But under the Timurids at Herat Persian miniature reached its peak. Shahrukh employed many artists, and his son Baysunghur founded a school to teach calligraphy and illumination. The Shahnameh of Baysunghur (1429), a wonder of brilliant color and flowing line, is kept with reverent care in the Golestan Palace library in Tehran and is the work of the Herat school. Seeing it for the first time is like discovering the beauties of Keats's odes.
Behzad
The real hero of Persian miniature painting, the Raphael of the East, was Kamal al-Din Behzad. He reflected in his works the horrors and upheavals of war that he had seen in life. Behzad was born in Herat around 1440, studied at Tabriz and then returned to Herat to paint for Sultan Husayn Bayqara and his wise vizier, Mir Ali-Shir Nava'i. When Herat became a battlefield between the Uzbeks and the Safavids, Behzad again sought refuge in Tabriz. He was among the first Persian painters to sign his works, yet the surviving works are few and scattered.
In the Royal Library of Egypt in Cairo, two miniatures in a manuscript of Saadi's Bustan show clerics debating difficult questions in a mosque. The manuscript is dated 1489 and its last page bears the inscription "Painted by the sinful servant, Behzad". The Freer Gallery in Washington has a picture of a young man painting, copied from Gentile Bellini and signed "Behzad". More doubtful are the miniatures of a copy of Nizami's Khamsa in the British Museum, and in the same collection a copy of the Zafarnama on Timur's conquests has miniatures attributed to him.
This handful of scattered works can hardly convey Behzad's matchless fame. His works surely show a sensitive grasp of the characters of people and things, delicacy and precision of line in conveying speed and vitality of movement, and taste and variety in the use of color. Still, they scarcely equal the miniatures made almost a century earlier in France for the Duke of Berry. His contemporaries believed he had brought about a great change in miniature painting, by the originality of his compositions, the fresh landscapes he painted and his effort to individualize faces and make them lively.
Khwandamir, the Persian historian, who was nearly fifty when Behzad died in 1523, perhaps out of friendly bias wrote of him that his drawing made the names of all the painters of the world forgotten and his miraculous fingers erased from memory the pictures of all artists born among the sons of Adam. To temper this judgment, we should remember that before Khwandamir wrote this, Leonardo had painted the Last Supper, Michelangelo the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and Raphael the frescoes of the Vatican, and Khwandamir had probably not heard of them.
Ceramics, Metalwork and Textiles
Pottery declined in this period from the peak it had reached under the Seljuks at Rey and Kashan. Rey was destroyed by repeated earthquakes and the Mongol invasion, and Kashan devoted most of its glazing kilns to making bricks. Even so, new tile centers arose in Soltaniyeh, Yazd, Tabriz, Herat, Isfahan, Shiraz and Samarkand. Glazed imitation-porcelain tile was now the popular product. Small clay tablets were glazed with a metallic color and fired to a lasting transparency. When patrons were wealthy, Persian architects used these tiles not only for mihrabs and interior decoration but to cover large wall surfaces and the grand entrances of mosques. In the Metropolitan Museum in New York there is a wonderful example of this tilework from the mihrab of the Baba Qasim mosque (about 1354).
Islamic metalworkers kept their skill. They made bronze doors and lamps for every mosque of Islam, from Bukhara to Marrakesh. Yet none of them made a work as beautiful and perfect as Ghiberti's "Doors of Paradise" (1401–1452) on the baptistery of Florence. In turn they made the best metal armor of the age: conical helmets that deflected blows, polished shields inlaid with silver and gold, and swords with Kufic words or floral designs engraved on the blades. They also made fine coins and medallions, including the medal with the fleshy profile of Mehmed the Conqueror, large brass candlesticks engraved with rhythmic Kufic or delicate flowers, and incense burners, pen boxes, mirror frames, caskets, braziers, bowls, ewers, basins, trays and even well-made, ornamented scissors and compasses.
Craftsmen who cut jewels, worked metals and precious stones or carved wood and ivory stood at the same high level. Little textile survives from this age, but miniatures show many fabrics, such as fine Cairo linens and the silk tents of Samarkand. It was in fact the illuminators who created the many intricate yet logical designs for the brocades, velvets and silks of the Mongol and Timurid periods, and even for the Persian and Turkish carpets that would soon be coveted by every European of taste.
In short, in the so-called "handicrafts", Islam was still the leader of the world.