Persian poetry, painting & patronage

Marianna Shreve Simpson

"Commissioned by Prince Sultan Ibrahim Mirza in 1556, five Iranian court calligraphers devoted nine years to transcribing the poetic text of the great Persian classic, the Haft awrang (Seven thrones), by the mystical poet Abdul-Rahman Jami. Then a team of gifted artists undertook the illumination and illustration of the manuscript. The masterpiece they created - housed today in the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and known as the Freer Jami - is a sumptuous volume of some three hundred folios of elegant cursive script with richly decorated margins, thousands of multicolored section dividers, nine illuminated headings and nine colophons that begin and end the main divisions of the text, and twenty-eight narrative paintings. This book reproduces to scale the Freer Jami paintings, discusses each in detail, and introduces the manuscript's patron and artists, painting style and...

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