Persian at Penn

Michael Barry’s lecture at the UPENN Middle East Center on October, 28 focused on a close reading of a middle period Iranian manuscript of Attar’s famous poem “The Canticle of the Birds”. Barry, a lecturer at Princeton University, has been working intently with this manuscript at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for some time now, and has since completed a monograph on the subject to accompany the newly re-opened Islamic Art galleries at the Met – the awkwardly re-titled: “The Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and Later South Asia”. Pages of the manuscript are on view there, I have seen them in a couple of visits I paid to the museum after it opened in 2010, and digital versions can be viewed at the Met’s website here.

The manuscript, much of which features the work of Behzad, who is widely considered to be the master of Persian miniature painting, but the folios on view were actually added later by the 17th century Safavid painter Habiballah, who worked for Shah ‘Abbas. The focus of the lecture built up to this image:

This painting by Habiballah is incredibly detailed – the whole canvas is 10in by 4.5in – depicts a hoo poe (hud hud) who is meant to represent the soul, particularly the 'highly polished mirror’ that is the soul of an accomplished mystic, particularly that of King Solomon (Barry, 2013).  All of the other birds, each has its own symbolic meaning, are being called to a higher level of reflection by the hoo poe so that they may emulate or mirror the divine spirit embodied by canonical figures like Solomon. They are surrounded by the “Tree of Life” and the “River of Life” both of which are common tropes in the figural Persianate miniatures, and looking on from the top is the figure of the devil, who is biting his thumb and carrying a gun (a sure sign that this is a 17th-century addition to the 15th century original). 

In fact, it is this aspect of emulation that provides the innovation in Islamic culture that allows for figural representation to happen in the first place. It is commonly understood that figural art is in fact outlawed in Islamic law, but through mystical representation and an interpretation of the story of Solomon and Züleyha (as well as an apocryphal story about Jesus Christ that is repeated in the Qur'an), suggest that certain masters of the discipline, such as Behzad, have been given 'permission’ to paint figures because his figures represent mirrors of the divine that are meant to be emulated, thus advancing the didactic reasoning of earlier Islamic philosophers like Avicenna into the world of art.

JR

Michael Barry, “The Canticle of the Birds” Lecture at the University of Pennsylvania, October 28, 2013.