Details | This lecture will explore the art of storytelling in the magnificent fourteenth-century Great Mongol Shahnama (“Book of Kings”). Completed in the year 1010 by the poet Ferdawsi, this sweeping epic retells the story of Iran from the beginning of time to the Arab conquest in the mid-seventh century. In the fifty-eight surviving illustrations of the Great Mongol Shahnama—one of the earliest and most impressive surviving copies—familiar tales take on fresh life as much more of the story is told. Renouncing a simple one-to-one equivalence between slimmed-down story and slimmed-down illustration, the painters of the Great Mongol Shahnama had a sense of the book’s grand design and how the illustrations might interact with each other and with Ferdawsi’s sweeping narrative. Thus, the images become personal commentaries on a familiar text. Artists make free use of subplots, developing meanings well beyond the text itself, transfixing the emotional core of a scene, and evoking the instantaneous thrill of action. The result is a series of highly dynamic and original compositions, unsurpassed in the history of Persian painting. Professor Robert Hillenbrand was educated at Cambridge and Oxford and has spent most of his career teaching at the University of Edinburgh. He has held visiting professorships at Princeton, UCLA, Bamberg, Leiden, Dartmouth College, New York, Cairo, and Groningen. He is currently teaching as Professorial Fellow of Islamic art at the University of St Andrews. His scholarly interests focus on Islamic architecture, painting, and iconography, with particular reference to Iran and early Islamic Syria. His eleven books include Imperial Images in Persian Painting; Islam Art and Architecture; The Architecture of Ottoman Jerusalem: An Introduction; the prize-winning Islamic Architecture: Form, Function and Meaning; The Holy Ark of Isfahan: An Unknown Masterpiece from Mongol Iran; and four volumes of his collected articles. In addition, he has edited or co-edited thirteen books. He has also published some 180 articles on aspects of Islamic art and architecture. He has served as Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge and is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. Register here: https://smithsonian.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_F6hiOem5RuKLtdbYRIXZEQ Image: Iskandar (Alexander) and the talking tree Folio from a Shahnama (Book of kings) by Firdawsi (died 1020) Iran, Tabriz, Il-Khanid dynasty (1256–1353), Mongol period, ca. 1330 Ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper Purchase—Charles Lang Freer Endowment Freer Gallery of Art F1935.23 |
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