Dāstāns inspired illustrations. From the epic poetry of the Shahnameh and the narrative tales of the Hamzanama, Stories of love, War, Court and Chivalry were depicted in dramatic performances and sumptuous manuscripts for the enjoyment of prince and public alike.
However, over the years, as the tradition of epic storytelling waned, the illustrated manuscripts of the genre came to be valued primarily for their illustrations. Pages were taken and sold for their pictorial value with little heed paid to the damage done to that which had originally inspired them; the narrative.
This paper discusses two different manuscripts in the context of the separation of their texts from their illustrations: The Mughal Hamzanama, and the Safavid Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasb.
The 360 tales of Mughal Hamzanama were said to have been illustrated by 1400 paintings of which only about 200 are known today. As in most manuscripts, each illustration was backed by text. As was customary, the relevant text faced its illustration, but the large size of the folios, which were held up to audiences at Akbar’s court, led to the presumption that each folio was meant to stand as an independent unit. One consequence was that once separated, and in many cases damaged, little effort was made to link the folios in a narrative sequence of text and illustration. This resulted in the extreme destruction of the Mughal Hamzanama.
The Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasb is the most magnificent Shahnameh in existence both in terms of the unprecedented number of illustrations, (258) and the presence and quality of the work of Iran’s most illustrious artists. It remained intact until 1970 after which, over twenty years, 140 of its illustrations were separated: 78 were gifted to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the rest sold and spread over private and public collections. Finally in 1994 it was returned to Iran with 118 of its miniatures, 503 double sided pages of text, Shamsa, and binding in a historic and controversial exchange with the Willem De Kooning Painting “Woman III.”
This paper studies the impact, and measures damage that the separation of text from illustration has caused these two manuscripts through the narrative of the Hamzanama’s “Zumurrud Shah Cycle”, and the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasb’s "Seven Trials of Rostam Cycle.”
