The Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp

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Surely one of the greatest of all illuminated manuscripts is the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, produced in Tabriz for the Safavid Shah Tahmasp I in the first half of the 16th century. Famously, this book, sometimes called the Houghton Shahnameh, which survived intact until the 1970s, was broken up by its then owner, Arthur Houghton, partly to donate and partly for sale. Wikipedia tells the story, as also does this 1996 article from the International Herald Tribune, published when four pages came up for auction at Sotheby's in London.

The Wikipedia page includes a link to a high-resolution reproduction of one of the most famous pages of the book, the scene showing The Court of Gayumars, which can be greatly magnified, making it possible to to examine the fascinating details.

As Wikipedia relates, in the 1990s a deal was made with the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art (TMoCA) to swap a De Kooning painting for about 120 illuminated pages of the great Shahnameh. As far as I know, this means Tehran now has the largest collection of leaves from Shah Tahmasp's book.

Wikimedia Commons offers links to sub-catalogues of illustrations in the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in Tehran. An hour or so spent browsing through these is an hour well spent.

In 2011, as part of celebrations for the 1,000th anniversary of Ferdowsi's epic, the enduring influence of which in Iran can hardly be overstated, the Metropolitan Museum and Yale University Press published a facsimile of all the illuminated leaves of Shah Tahmasp's Shahnameh. This was soon out of print. Fortunately I bought one - along with a magnifying glass, essential when leafing through the book of an evening.

Fereydoun Ave's 2010 work Rostam in Late Summer (see below) is just one of many examples of how the Shahnameh continues to permeate Iranian culture today. Rostam, a hero who might be likened to Hercules in the west, is one of the epic's central figures.



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