ars orientalis volume 35 editorial board editorial committee designer editorial offices

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1 ARS ORIENTALIS 35

2 ars orientalis volume 35 editorial board Ann C. Gunter, co-editor Martin J. Powers, co-editor Debra Diamond Massumeh Farhad Thelma K. Thomas editorial committee Sussan Babaie Kevin Carr Joseph Chang Louise Cort Julian Raby Margaret Cool Root James T. Ulak J. Keith Wilson Ann Yonemura designer Edna Jamandre editorial offices Ars Orientalis Freer Gallery of Art Smithsonian Institution P.O. Box 37012, MRC 707 Washington, D.C issn Printed in the United States of America 2008 Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Cosponsored by the Department of the History of Art, University of Michigan, and the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Ars Orientalis solicits scholarly manuscripts on the art and archaeology of Asia, including the ancient Near East and the Islamic world. Fostering a broad range of themes and approaches, articles of interest to scholars in diverse fields or disciplines are particularly sought, as are suggestions for occasional thematic issues and reviews of important books in Western or Asian languages. Brief research notes and responses to articles in previous issues of Ars Orientalis will also be considered. Submissions must be in English, with all non-english quotations normally provided in translation. Authors are asked to follow The Chicago Manual of Style, 15th ed. A style sheet is available from the editorial office. Subscription rates: U.S.: Individual $35.00 Shipping and handling $4.00 Institution $45.00 Shipping and handling $4.00. Foreign: Individual $35.00 Shipping and handling $5.50 Institution $45.00 Shipping and handling $5.50 Special subscription rates are currently available as a membership option through the American Oriental Society. For more information, please contact the American Oriental Society, Hatcher Graduate Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan , or access the society s home page at The full text of Ars Orientalis is also available in the electronic versions of Art Index. Printed on acid-free paper. For deliveries (DHL, FedEx, UPS, courier): 1050 Independence Ave., S.W. Washington, D.C Inquiries concerning journal submissions and editorial matters: arsorientedit@si.edu Subscription-related inquires (invoice, payment, and change of address): arsorientsubscribe@si.edu

3 contents 6 illustrated books may be hazardous to your health A New Reading of the Arabic Reception and Rendition of the Materia Medica of Dioscorides George Saliba, Columbia University and Linda Komaroff, Los Angeles County Museum of Art 67 pluralism of styles in sixth-century china A Reaffirmation of Indian Models Angela Howard, Rutgers University 96 imperial portraiture as symbol of political legitimacy A New Study in the Portraits of Successive Emperors Ning Qiang, Connecticut College 129 hu zhengyan Fashioning Biography Suzanne E. Wright, The University of Tennessee 155 the world s a stage The Theatricality of Chen Hongshou s Figure Painting Shi-yee Liu, Metropolitan Museum of Art 192 goryeo buddhist painting in an interregional context Yukio Lippit, Harvard University book reviews 233 Gender and Power in the Japanese Visual Field, edited by Joshua S. Mostow, Norman Bryson, and Maribeth Graybill The Artist as Professional in Japan, edited by Melinda Takeuchi Morgan Pitelka, Occidental College 243 Shahnama: The Visual Language of the Persian Book of Kings, edited by Robert Hillenbrand David J. Roxburgh, Harvard University 247 Elegant Debts: The Social Art of Wen Zhengmin, by Craig Clunas Susan E. Nelson, Indiana University

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5 book review david j. roxburgh Shahnama: The Visual Language of the Persian Book of Kings Edited by Robert Hillenbrand. VARIE Occasional Papers II xiv pages, bibliographies, index, 111 illustrations (62 color), 6 tables. London: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., $99.95 hardcover The twelve papers composing this volume derive from a conference convened at Edinburgh University in March In his preface, Robert Hillenbrand notes that this conference, devoted exclusively to questions of art history, is but one of several organized under the wider remit of the Cambridge-Edinburgh Shahnama project. The latter, a five-year project ( ) generously funded by the British Academy s Arts and Humanities Research Board, was jointly directed by Charles Melville and Robert Hillenbrand and also sponsored a database of illustrated Shahnama manuscripts and single folios. No less important than this ambitious project is another one based at Princeton University, established by Marianna Shreve Simpson and the late Jerome W. Clinton. It presently comprises a database of 277 images from five Shahnama manuscripts housed in the Firestone Library, Princeton University. 1 To these two initiatives may be added a third: the new edition of Firdawsi s Shahnama (Book of Kings) currently in preparation by Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh. Since 1987, five volumes (out of eight) have been published. The promise of these three initiatives is not only to generate a critical mass of interest in the Shahnama of Firdawsi, but also to provide crucial resources for scholars of the history of art and literature. Both the Cambridge- Edinburgh and Princeton projects have brought together specialists in literature and art history. Their cross-disciplinary aspect now establishes the possibility of tackling in an unprecedented way interactions and interrelations between text and image through the chief epic of Persian poetry. Shahnama: The Visual Language of the Persian Book of Kings opens with an essay by Robert Hillenbrand in which he glosses the subject matters of the contributions and goes on to note that It is no longer enough to answer the standard questions of who, what, where and when questions that, rooted as they are in the evolution of Western art history, are inappropriately Eurocentric for an art forged in quite another culture (p. 5). Later, he concludes: The time-honoured focus on patronage, date, provenance and style is as relevant as ever, for it provides the basic building blocks for more elaborate investigations. But to a steadily increasingly extent it is being supplemented by new approaches which can be sampled in this volume (p. 7). The new approaches evidenced in most of the volume s essays, especially those focused on manuscripts, however, involve the application of codicology to well-known and less well-known objects. Essays by Jonathan Bloom, Sheila Blair, Elaine Wright and Tim Stanley all demonstrate the continued importance of physical analysis, whether of paper or the structure of the book, and the formal analysis of calligraphy and painting, to uncover the original constitution of an object and reveal changes made in later periods. These approaches, while hardly new they have been applied with greater rigor and consistency in scholarship since the late 243

6 1980s remain essential to the study of Islamic books given the forces of the art market beginning in the early 1900s. From that time onward, manuscripts were frequently disassembled to enable dealers to maximize the profit of a given book by selling its multiple paintings as individual folios. Sheila Blair s contribution to the volume continues her research presented in earlier articles and in a book co-authored with Oleg Grabar on the Great Mongol Shahnama of the 1330s. Here she pays close attention to the manuscript s calligraphy, identifying hands datable to between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries. She also reviews recent arguments by Abolala Soudavar, who similarly analyzed the copyists hands and proposed that each subject selected for illustration did double service by depicting a tale from the Shahnama that also resonated with an event from Mongol history. 2 Many of the challenges to art historians presented by the Great Mongol Shahnama today result from its disassembly by the Belgian dealer Georges Demotte in the early 1900s. Demotte also had many folios altered to prepare them for sale. Though these modern interventions are often the most dramatic and physically invasive, accounting for the many single-page paintings now held by private and public collections worldwide, earlier moments in the history of key objects are also considered. Thus, Jonathan Bloom discusses the papers of the Great Mongol Shahnama and the repairs and alterations made to the manuscript under the Qajar dynasty of nineteenth-century Iran. The two essays by Blair and Bloom point to the fact that our knowledge of the Great Mongol Shahnama as a totality, as a bound manuscript, is still elusive. They offer a caveat to any attempt at an overarching interpretation of the factors that shaped the original illustrative program and how its illustrative cycle generated meaning for contemporary viewers. Moreover, while fifty-eight paintings from the manuscript are known to have survived into modern times, it remains unclear how they were fitted into the original text and how many paintings are missing. In earlier research, Blair adjusted the projected estimate the likely total number of manuscript paintings that she initially calculated in her study co-authored with Oleg Grabar. 3 Making these projections seems to be an intractable problem. Since we do not possess the complete recension of the Shahnama copied in the Great Mongol Shahnama, and we know of no Shahnama from the period either earlier or later that matches any other line for line, on what grounds can one hypothesize the nature and scope of the text in a now dispersed manuscript? Grabar and Blair already in 1980 addressed the methodological problem of a mutating text and the same point is made again in Hillenbrand s edited volume (pp. 3 and 97). As Tim Stanley adroitly puts it, the project pursued by art historians in fact runs entirely counter to the philological traditions canonised in the nineteenth century, which have focused all efforts on the establishment of an Urtext (p. 97). This 244 david j. roxburgh

7 phenomenon the addition or removal of lines of poetry or even larger-scaled alterations of cycles within the Shahnama calls for a wholly different mode of text-image analysis if one is to consider a whole book and not just single page after single page (meditations on the immediate relationship between a text and how its image sits inside it). A mode of treating the individual book as a whole and not just the seemingly infinite single pages that will be scanned into the Cambridge- Edinburgh database has yet to be conceptualized. Elaine Wright s contribution considers two manuscripts containing Persian epics, including Firdawsi s Shahnama, now in the British Library, London, and the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin. The two manuscripts were once bound together as a single textblock. Through a painstaking study of codicology (especially paper and calligraphy), she determines that paintings were added to the originally single manuscript several years after the dated colophon (1397). She thus redates a manuscript once thought to represent the bibliophilism of Timur, founder of the Timurid dynasty, to the early 1400s and the bibliophile activity of one of Timur s grandsons, possibly Iskandar Sultan. Though Wright presents her findings modestly, the implications of her discovery are clearly important for our understanding of Persian painting in the late 1300s and early 1400s and for reconstructing the chief lines of development in multiple bookmaking centers of Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. Tim Stanley s essay uses a related approach, presenting a sixteenth-century manuscript made in Shiraz through a detailed description that includes translations of later seals and notations added by Mughal owners. Stanley also reassesses the value of Grace Guest s work on the Shiraz canon, whereby she attempted to explain proportional relationships between pictorial spaces in paintings in relation to the surface area of written text on each folio. 4 An essay by M. Amin Mahdavi, who studies evidence of grid layouts in a sampling of Persian manuscripts in the British Library, pursues Guest s line of research. Other contributions that focus on manuscripts include Marianna Shreve Simpson s review essay examining historiography during the 1900s. As a scholar who has made several important contributions to the study of the Shahnama, the formative phases of Shahnama illustration in books and Shahnama related subject-matter on portable objects, she offers many cogent and prescient observations. Her essay concludes with a superb bibliography. Ada Adamova, who has also devoted considerable energy to the study of the Shahnama in the early 1300s, turns her attention to the still intact St. Petersburg Shahnama, dated 733/1333. She not only compares this manuscript to others produced for the Inju dynasty of the province of Fars (southwestern Iran) and identifies patterns of illustration across them, but helps to recuperate these manuscripts as objects worthy of art 245 book reviews

8 notes 1. ~shahnama/ 2. Abolala Soudavar, The Saga of Abu-Sa id Bahador Khan. The Abusa idname, in The Court of the Il-khans, , ed. Julian Raby and Teresa Fitzherbert, Oxford Studies in Islamic Art 12 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), Oleg Grabar and Sheila Blair, Epic Images and Contemporary History: The Illustrations of the Great Mongol Shahnama (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980). 4. Grace Dunham Guest, Shiraz Painting in the Sixteenth Century (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution, Freer Gallery of Art, 1949). 5. Marianna Shreve Simpson, Narrative Allusion and Metaphor in the Decoration of Medieval Islamic Objects, in Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and Marianna Shreve Simpson, Studies in the History of Art 16 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1985), historians interest. For a long time, manuscripts produced under the Inju were regarded as sub-par artistically, and yet Adamova reveals the excitement of their drawing style and their frequently daring composition (relative to the four small Shahnamas of ca. 1300). She also suggests, though does not elaborate, possible interactions between the painted illustrations found in the Inju material and the small Shahnamas and other metropolitan Ilkhanid manuscripts from Tabriz. The remaining four essays in the volume under review by Sylvia Auld, Avinoam Shalem, Ulrike al-khamis and Godfrey Evans, and Jennifer Scarce take a wholly different tack. Rather than focusing on manuscript copies of Firdawsi s Shahnama, they each consider objects metalwork, textiles, and relief sculptures that employ Shahnama-related subject-matter in their visual programs and over a larger chronology that spans the fourteenth to nineteenth century. Although these are thoughtful and judiciously researched essays, careful studies of individual objects, they do not surpass in their methodological implications the essay published by Shreve Simpson in Already by that time, Simpson had identified the various vehicles textual and oral through which epic tales such as Firdawsi s Shahnama found life and cultural currency and the various ways that visual subject-matters could be related to a text, whether written down or recited from memory. Shahnama: The Visual Language of the Persian Book of Kings contains much of interest and importance to students of Islamic history of art and literature. It may very well facilitate the quantum leap forward (p. 7) in the study of illustrated Shahnamas predicted by Robert Hillenbrand. David J. Roxburgh, Ph.D. (1996) in history of art, University of Pennsylvania, is Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Professor of Islamic art history at Harvard University. His recent publications include The Persian Album, : From Dispersal to Collection (2005); Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years , editor and contributor (2005); and Traces of the Calligrapher: Islamic Calligraphy in Practice, c , co-authored with Mary McWilliams (2007). roxburgh@fas. harvard.edu. 246 david j. roxburgh