Architecture at Isfahan
In Isfahan the shrine of Harun-i Vilayat revived the particular grace of ancient Iranian designers and offered an example of the finest combination of color and imitation-porcelain tile. The half-dome that crowns the portal of the Friday Mosque, built on the difficult principles of the architect's craft, also belongs to that period. At the same time a congregational mosque was built in Shiraz, of which no trace remains today.
The Art of the Book
In many cases the delicate art of illuminators and calligraphers has outlived tall buildings, and so the honor Islam gave the book, which was almost worshipped as an idol, has been repaid. The Arabs, who boasted of everything, were forgivably attached to their alphabet, since by combining waters they could create lines with charming curves and flourishes. The Persians raised calligraphy to the height of its beauty, adorning with it the mihrabs and portals of their mosques, their weapons, pots and carpets, and left exquisite manuscripts of the Quran and of their poets' works so that future generations would always take pleasure in them with eye and soul.
The Nastaliq script, which had flourished under the Timurids in Tabriz, Herat and Samarkand, returned to Tabriz under the Safavid kings and afterward went with them to Isfahan. Just as nearly a dozen kinds of art worked together to build every mosque, so for every manuscript the poet, calligrapher, miniaturist and binder cooperated with the utmost sincerity and faith.
Miniature Painting in Tabriz
Miniature painting continued to thrive at Bukhara, Herat, Shiraz and Tabriz. The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston keeps a fine manuscript of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh signed by al-Raji Muhammad al-Qawam Shirazi (dated 1538 in the book). The Cleveland Museum has another, illuminated by Murshid Katib (1538), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a copy of Nizami's Khamsa with some of the finest examples of miniature painting and calligraphy of the Tabriz school (1545). When Behzad settled in Tabriz, around 1510, the center of miniature painting moved with him to that city.
At the time of the battle of Chaldiran, Shah Ismail hid the miniaturist Kamal al-Din Behzad and the calligrapher Shah Mahmud Nishapuri in a cellar as his two most precious treasures. Behzad's pupil Aqa Mirak produced at Tabriz one of the masterpieces of the period, a painting of Khusraw and Shirin (1539), now in the British Museum. Aqa Mirak in turn taught the art to Sultan Muhammad Nur.
Sultan Muhammad was born into a wealthy family and, though he had every chance of turning out worthless, became the "precious pearl" of Shah Tahmasp's court, for he excelled at calligraphy, miniature painting and the design of book covers and carpets. Between 1539 and 1543 he copied and illustrated a Khamsa of Nizami. One of its exquisite pages, in the British Museum, shows Khusraw on a dark bay horse looking secretly through green, brown and gold foliage toward Shirin as she bathes in a silvery pool. Still brighter and more transparent is the picture of the Prophet riding his winged steed Buraq across the heavens to visit paradise and hell. The figures are graceful and delicate but deliberately and out of faith free of any marked individual features.
The artist was more committed to creating a beautiful pattern than to showing the reality of nature, and he preferred beauty, which is inward and therefore attainable, to truth, which is outward and always fleeting. In these works Persian miniature and illumination reached the peak of their beauty and refinement.
Textiles and the Persian Carpet
The same eager precision and delicate design went into fabrics and carpets. No fabric of these royal periods survives, but their patterns can be seen in miniatures. In carpet weaving, Safavid designers and craftsmen were without rival. The carpet was in fact one of the chief instruments of civilization in Islam. Muslims used no chairs. They sat and ate on the floor, or on ground covered with carpets. At prayer they spread a special small carpet, the prayer rug, usually decorated with religious forms and Quranic verses, and bowed on it. Carpets were also much favored as gifts for friends and kings and as endowments to mosques. When Selim II came to the throne, for example, Shah Tahmasp sent him twenty large carpets and several silk and gold-woven rugs (1566).
Some of the common classified Persian carpet designs are the garden pattern, the floral pattern, the hunting-ground pattern, the boteh pattern, the vase pattern and the medallion pattern. But other forms were also used, such as arabesques, Chinese clouds, symbolic marks with particular meanings for experts, animals that brought movement and life to the scene, and plants and flowers that offered charming lines and cheerful colors. Remarkably, a kind of artistic logic and order makes these scattered and mixed elements into a single balanced whole whose harmony and contrast of lines are more charming and winning than the harmonies and dissonances of Palestrina's madrigals or the tresses of Godiva.
Famous Carpets
A number of famous Persian carpets survive from the first half of the sixteenth century to this day. One is a medallion carpet whose woolen wefts are knotted on silken warps with 30,000,000 knots, at 60 per square centimeter by the book's count. For centuries it adorned a mosque at Ardabil, and now it is divided between the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Los Angeles museum. In a rectangular frame at one end a poem of Hafez is inscribed, and beneath it the proud words "the work of the servant Maqsud of Kashan in the year 946", which is 1539.
The Los Angeles museum also has a very large carpet known as the "Coronation Carpet," used at the coronation of Edward VII (1901). The Poldi Pezzoli Museum in Milan, before the Second World War destroyed it, had among its most valuable treasures a hunting-ground carpet made by Ghiyath al-Din Jami of Yazd, known as Behzad the carpet designer. The Duke of Anhalt carpet, from the Duveen collection, became world-famous for its yellow-gold ground and the delicacy of its purple, turquoise and red arabesques.
Among the undoubted glories Iran enjoyed in the Safavid age, the carpet and the book have kept their lofty place in human memory more than anything else.