Kaempfer's sketch of the "Great Messczit" in Isfahan

He lodged in Isfahan for nearly 20 months (29 March 1684 to 20 November 1685) – during which time he carried out a methodological survey of the town. The most famous of his drawings of Isfahan is his Planographia, a birdseye axionometric drawing of the city, which has been used by many scholars to help fix the location of various palaces and other buildings.

A page from Kaempfer's sketchbook, showing the Ali Qapu

I’m going to show you something else here: his drawing of the “Great Messczit” (Shah Abbas I’s great Mosque on the Maidan); and his sketches of the buildings along the west side of the Maidan (the Ali Qapu).

In the manuscripts, Kaempfer writes in a mixture of German and Latin which is very difficult to read (for me, anyway!). But a printed translation writes of how the Safavid maidan: “is surrounded by two-storeyed vaulted buildings with recesses. The upper floors are divided into small rooms that are rented out as dormitories for all sorts of foreigners as well as prostitutes. The ground floor of this arcade serves partly as a covered walk for pedestrians but in the main to accommodate spacious bazaar stalls for shopkeepers and craftsmen who produce and sell a variety of goods there.”

He also mentions something I have not seen described anywhere else: “On the . . eastern side one’s eye is caught by the exceedingly elegant Mosque of Shaykh LutfAllah, which is covered in gleaming tiles, as well as by a hall along the walls of which the curious viewer is presented with mechanical figures in warlike poses, which for a few small coins will enact vivid scenes”.

Does anyone know of any other accounts of this?

It’s your chance to see high quality Islamic objects up close! If you’re nice, the sales ladies will probably even let you touch!

There’s lots – but maybe the highlights for me include:

At Sothebys (click here to get to the e-catalogue, then search for the lot number – or just browse):

Lot 475: An illuminated leaf from the Shah Ismail Shahnameh. This has especially lovely illustration of the paintings on the wall behind Kay Khosraw. Other folios are in the Aga Khan online museum here, and in the Reza Abbasi Museum in Tehran.

Lot 584: An Indo-Persian celestial globe. This is such fun!

Sothebys also has an Ottoman and an Orientalist sale.

At Christies (click here to get to the e-catalogue, then search for the lot number – or just browse:

Lot 152: A very cute battle scene from the Shahnama (look especially at the shield).

Lot 153: The execution of Mazdah – also from the Shahnama. Many of the participants (assailants and victims) are dressed in very beautiful textiles – are they woven, are they embroidered?

Lot 155: Bahram Gur in the Green Pavilion – also with very pretty wall paintings.

Last – and most certainly not least: Lot 175: Are these leopards or cheetahs in the background? And look at that very sumptuous palanquin!

LAST CHANCE:

Thurs 19 April. AKPIA lecture: 5.30 Room 318, Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Chaharbaghs, Palaces and Mughal Court Routine in the Sixteenth Century

Thurs 19 April. Iran Society lecture.
Challenges and New Waves in Iranian Art Now

NEW: May History today issue: Islam’s Origins: Where Mystery Meets History.
Read online for a limited time

APRIL:

Mon 23 April. UCL Interdisciplinary Medieval and Renaissance Seminar: 6.15pm. Room G09. 24-5 Gordon Sq, London WC1 6BT. FREE
Prof Trevor Dean: Medieval Italian Vendettas: Fact or fiction

Thurs 26 April. AKPIA lecture: 5.30 Room 318, Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Mustafa Ali and the Arts of the Book

Thurs 26 April. AKPIA lecture: 5.30 Room 318, Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Mustafa Ali and the Arts of the Book

Fri 27-Sun 29 April. The Asia House Fair.
A unique showcase for the work of artisans, designers and master craftsmen

MAY:

Wed 2 May 2012. Indian Art Circle lecture. 6.30pm. SOAS, B111
Jahangir’s Journey. The Art of an Itinerant Court

Thursday 3 May 2012: 6.00pm: SOAS, B111. FREE
Jennifer Scarce:  Research Seminar in Islamic Art: “The Role of Painting in the Art of Qajar Iran (1785-1925) – Royal Portraits, Still Life and Much More”

Monday 7 May 2012: 4-6pm: Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre, Saïd Business School, Oxford. FREE, needs online registration.
Images and History – A lecture by Shirin Neshat
The art museum in the 21st century – A lecture by Malcolm Rogers

Thursday 10 May 2012: 4-6pm: Nelson Mandela Lecture Theatre, Saïd Business School, Oxford. FREE, needs online registration.
Portraiture: pasts and futures
A symposium with Shirin Neshat, Malcolm Rogers (Humanitas Visiting Professor in Museums, Galleries and Libraries), William A. Ewing (Curator, Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Lausanne), and A.S. Byatt (Writer).

Wed 16 May: Islamic Art Circle lecture. KLT, SOAS, 7pm.
An early Fatimid rock crystal ewer in context

Thurs 17 May. Iran Society lecture.
Colonel Peysan and his rebellion of 1921

NEW: Fri 19 May. Frenemies + Jigsaw. Brunei Gallery Lecture Theatre, SOAS, 7.30pm
Israeli-Iranian Stand-up Comedy. NOT free.

JUNE:

6 June. Indian Art Circle lecture. 6.30pm. SOAS, B111
Indian Ocean Exchange in the Indo-Roman Period

13 June. Islamic Art Circle lecture. KLT, SOAS, 7pm.
The last Fatimid fortifications. The Towers of the Vizier Saladin

15-16 June 2012. Conference at Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. NOT free
Early Modern Merchants as Collectors

Tues 19 June. Iran Society lecture.
The awkwardness of Nader Shah

LATER:

18-20 October 2012: Historians of Islamic Art Association: Third Biennial Symposium, in New York

NEW ONLINE:

A digitized Persian manuscript in the Princeton Digital Library of Islamic Manuscripts – the so-called Peck Shahnama – is now available online.

Please don’t hesitate to suggestion additions to this list – just email me

Bedasht caravanserai - now converted into a volleyball court

There’s also a mosque – this was the only village all along the Khurasan Highway where I heard a call for prayer – and what was a beautiful caravanserai, now converted into a (wind-free) volleyball court.

The satellite image below shows, from top down: the caravanserai (with the typical outline of a Safavid caravanserai), the mosque, the namaskhane, and the earth fort. You can click on any of the placemarkers to see what it’s pointing at – and zoom in and out, or move the image around if you want to see what the neighbours are up to.

Click here, to see a photo of the remains of the huge fort. When Valentine Baker visited this in 1876, he described it as:

“a small one [of the many forts in the area], 640 yards in circumference.  These works, composed of solid earth, are raised to a height of from sixty to a hundred feet. There is no ditch round them, but it is evident that the earth of which they are composed has been dug out from the ground for about 200 or 300 yards round, as this is always on a rather lower level than the surrounding country”.

Some of this is discernable on the satellite image – though it does seem amazing that this huge edifice was ever considered small.

View Bedasht in a larger map
 

The three cyclists in 'Around the world on a wheel'

John Foster Fraser’s account of the two year trip is full of colonial-style anecdotes (many of which are a little too close to racism for many modern readers). His was also not the first bike-trip acrossPersia(the earliest I can find was two American students, Thomas Gaskell Allen, Jr. and William Lewis Sachtleben, in 1894 – click here if you want to read their whole account).

Of course, one can’t underestimate the practical difficulties of cycling across the deserts and mountains of Persia, especially at a time when roads were much rarer than now. And JFF does have a few stories that are perhaps worth re-telling.

Mozaffer al Din - looking grumpy in his big kolah

For example, click here to read about the cycling display he and his friends put on for the Zill-i Sultan, in the grounds of the Chehel Sutun.

And here, for his account of the harem he passed on the road, travelling in ‘hutches’ swung aside mules – just like the descriptions here and here in the blog earlier

Perhaps most fun of all – though second-hand – is his account of Muzzafer ad Din’s coronation. The

“crowning of the Shah . . was a quiet but irksome ceremony. The day was excessively hot, and as soon as His Majesty could escape, he hastened off to his private rooms . . ten minutes afterwards, [he was] sitting in a draught and his shirt sleeves, on some steps in the corridor, the crown still on his head, though pushed somewhat awry . . ‘Oh, I am so warm! And this thing’ he said, taking off the crown and pitching it on one side, ‘is so heavy. I hope I won’t have to ever put it on again.’

On another occasion he took off his big kolah, which was weighty with big diamonds, and, throwing it to the corner of the room, said ‘I’m not going to have my head cracked with a load like that on it. Let the stones be removed’.

Click here if you want to read the whole of JFF’s adventures - Persia is on pages 110 to 200.

Lion (representing the sun) eating a bull (representing the earth), in Persepolis. Symbol of the New Year. Image: Anatoly Terentiev

To see a very lovely video on the Zoroastrian celebration of New Year, please click here. This video says that the celebration of New Year came even before the time of Zoroaster; and explains how the reliefs at Persepolis showing a lion eating a bull are representations of the New Year.

This is also the blog’s second birthday: for the 2010 New Year, the focus was on how Shah Abbas celebrated Norouz; then in 2011, it was about Chaharshanbe Suri – the jumping over bonfires on the last Wednesday before the New Year.

Happy New Year to all of you!

The Khargerd madreseh

I’ve always wanted to know exactly when (and how) the famous star tiles were taken off the Khargird madreseh. You can see some of the tiles in London (in the V&A and also in the British Museum); in the Met in New York; and in the David Museum in Copenhagen. If you have (lots of) spare cash, you might even be able to buy one: Christies sold one for $64,000 in 2004; and another one for more than $50K in 2005.

In 1894, Yate – the same man who had witnessed the wanton destruction of another masterpiece by the same architect – wrote of how the madreseh was “defaced by time and weather, but much was still perfect”. He commented that “as mosaic work cannot be taken out and carried away like tiles, it ought to remain as long as wind and weather permit”.

View up into the iwan: the gaps are where the star tiles were taken from

By 1905, however, the British consul Sykes noted that the (non-mosaic?) tiles had “almost all been removed”; although he was then able to buy some in nearby Mashhad.

When you look closely at Sykes’ lantern slides (now in the British Museum collection), maybe he was closer to the thieves than he knew – or perhaps let on.

In one of his slides (click here), you can see a sort of  ‘scaffolding’ in one of the iwans. I’ve included one of my modern pictures here, with very similar ‘gaps’ in the tiling.

Could the ‘frame’ in Sykes’ picture be the one that the thieves must have used to climb up when they removed the tiles?

Click here to see my little film showing you round the madreseh – and here to read Renata Holod’s article on the building.

The entrance hall at the 1910 exhibition, where the Vasa tapestries were hung

EM Troelenberg suggests that: “[t]he best way to proceed is to take a little tour through [the 1910] exhibition. Immediately after entering we find ourselves in an elegant foyer with pointed arches and mashrabiya. Yet this is a mere prelude to the monumental entrance hall designed by the Munich architect Ernst Fiechter, whose plan follows the general outlines of Persian iwan architecture, with wide pointed arches and shallow niches.” This ‘hall of honour’ is one of the two images of the exhibition most commonly included in modern (and contemporary) books.

It was also where the tapestries newly ‘rediscovered’ by Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria were displayed. These were very definitely one of the stars of the show: as well as being in pole position, display-wise; they were selected to be shown (as only 23 of the objects were) in spectacular collotype colour in the mammoth catalogue.

Sigismund/Muratowicz/Rupprecht’s tapestries were woven with reference to a design brought from Poland; with more than a hint of the Polish King Sigismund’s Swedish crown (which he’d just lost); and then sent as part of a dowry to the Elector of Palatine/House of Wittelsbach; before being ‘rediscovered’ in Munich. Troelenberg has suggested that the European aspects of their history were “erased from the exhibition’s presentation”.  She describes them as being “returned to their ‘Islamic’ context”.

Images from Ardabil in Denkmaler Persischer Baukunst

Certainly, the ornamental motifs Fiechter used for his great hall were inspired by monuments in Ardabil or Isfahan – via illustrations in Sarre’s book Denkmaler Persischer Baukunst.

The mosque room, in Munich in 1910

Incidentally, the other commonly-reproduced image from the exhibition display is of the other vaguely ‘Oriental’ setting (although this made not even most cursory of attempts at historical or locational accuracy).  A so-called ‘mosque’ was set up in a central room with a low suspended ceiling, where the steel beams were disguised as columns. The carpets on display came from nearly every region and period, although “most of them were probably of minor quality”.

This raises (at least) two questions for me:

There was a huge academic push at the end of the nineteenth century to get the ‘so-called Polish’ carpets and tapestries understood as actually having been made in Persia. While they were clearly not made in Poland; perhaps the insistence on their Persian-ness ignores the European and other influences on their manufacture?

Then, maybe Munich wasn’t quite such a thought-through paradigm shift as I, in my naivete, had believed?  A harassed Sarre wrote to Bode about the “unfortunate exhibition . . I would rather see the exhibition not take place, but one must not give up now”.

Sandy Morton, translator of 'Mission to the Lord Sophy' having his photo taken in Mashhad

Michele Membré was a Venetian Cypriot, tasked by the Venetian Doge with delivering a letter. This letter, hidden in a book binding, urged Shah Tahmasp to help Venice by attacking the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman from the East.

Membré (eventually) reached Tahmasp’s military camp (urdu), and his description of this is uniquely detailed. Membré recording seeing 5000 tents and 14,000 horsemen; while “of horses and mules [the Shah] had so many that they could not be counted”.

The court was surrounded by “a cord as thick as a finger” suspended on poles fixed into the ground, and with two entrances.

Within the cord were the Shah’s ‘pavilions’.  The audience palace, or divankhana, had three pavilions – the first of which was for the actual audiences.  The second pavilion was “very large” and “there, within, stands an utaq”.  This was “made of sticks of gilded wood in the form of a dome and covered over with scarlet. Upon the cloth is foliage, cut out and sewn with silk. Within, on the ground, there was a red felt, lined with a kind of woollen canvas, and over the said felt there were very fine carpets of silk, on which appeared figures of many animals and foliage”.  The third of the tents, “30 to 25 paces behind” was where the Shah “sleeps when it is not cold”.  There was also a “stew, that is bath” for the Shah. To the west “is another dome, covered in scarlet . . in which are painters”.  Then there were  “about five” old men, guardians, outside an entrance which AH Morton presumed was that of the women’s quarters.

Outside of the “King’s court” were the kitchen and supply tents, next to which “stand the tents of the most beloved of the Lords, [and then more] tents as far as a man could see, all well-ordered, with their streets”.

Tile inside Khajeh Rabi mausoleum. Photo by 'Behi' as in nearby link

Dont miss out on a series of photos by Alfred Molon here.

And look here for more great images of the mausoleum interior by Behnam

Safavid tiles in Khajeh Rabi mausoleum: detail. Image from 'Behi' as in nearby link.

Press TV have a little film: look here – from 3.07 for the mausoleum (or maybe I should say mass-0h-leum): the rest of the film is about the Friday mosque in Sabsavar). The film doesn’t have great images – though it does give the most detailed information I can find about Khajeh Rabee: suggesting that he was a companion of Ali, no less. Other sources say that he was a companion to the Holy Prophet himself, or someone who accompanied Imam Reza to Khorasan.

Whatever the truth is (and I’m really open to offers of info!), his shrine was obviously important enough to be decorated during the reign of Shah Abbas the Great, with inscriptions by the pre-eminent calligrapher Ali Reza Abbasi (look here , here and here for images of this) in AH 1026 / CE 1617 and AH 1621 / CE 1621.