Focusing the Gaze

Chapter 2 Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting Even if, according to Robert Hillenbrand, “Timurid paintings do not wear their hearts on their sleeves” and “their secrets must be pried out of them one by one,” this study shares Hillenbrand’s personal conviction that in fact “the code can be broken.”1 Scholars over the years have employed various “devices” to break the code. Hillenbrand himself examined in “The Uses of Space in Timurid Painting,” four such devices used by Timurid painters to construct compositions and create pictorial narratives.2 A pioneering study by Rachel Milstein reads into the differentiation of space distinct meanings or temporalities, and points to the use of architectural elements to build narrative.3 More recently, Sarah Chapman suggested several devices such as the positioning of figures according to a hidden grid based on text boxes.4 My own study of the codes of Late Timurid painting leads me to suggest another device used by these painters to draw the observer’s attention and influence the content of the illustration. I call this element a focalizor after Mieke Bal, who defines a focalizor as a figure through which the reader sees or reads the events of the story: [T]he focalizor, is the point from which the elements are viewed. That point can lie with a character […] or outside it. If the focalizor coincides with the character, that character will have a technical advantage over the other characters. The reader watches with the character’s eyes and will, in principle, be inclined to accept the vision presented by that character.5 Bal calls the focalizor who looks at something within the painting an internal focalizor, while the external focalizor is defined as beholding the viewer,6 and both are found in the paintings discussed here. Unlike text, painting does not offer the visual tools by which narrative events are perceived as being seen by one character and redirecting the observer according to that character’s 1 2 3 4 5 Hillenbrand, “Uses of Space,” 94 and 98. Hillenbrand, “Uses of Space,” 76–102. Milstein, “Sufi Elements,” 357–369. Chapman, “Mathematics and Meaning,” 33–68. Bal, Narratology, 103. By applying her method to some paintings and drawings of Rembrandt, Bal adds further levels of complexity to the focalizor; see Bal, Reading “Rembrandt”, 138–176. 6 Bal, Reading “Rembrandt”, 169. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004398412_004 18 Chapter 2 perspective. In paintings, all the figures stand before the observer at the same moment, and all the components are grasped at one glance. But the painter can still direct the observer to various features and compose a pictorial narrative using devices referred to above. Three illustrations are examined in this chapter, Hārūn al-Rashīd in the ḥammām and The garden master and the maidens, of the Khamsa Or.6810, and, The king who turned into a parrot, of the Khamsa by Amīr Khusrau Dehlavī, kept in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin Per. 163.38. This chapter expounds on the idea of using the focalizor as a catalyst a mystical reading of the illustrations. This does not mean that the figures referred to in the chapter were perceived by contemporary audiences in the way I suggest reading them today. I am merely offering new tools with which to approach paintings and suggesting an alternative way to read them. Moreover, I am aware that paintings in manuscripts, not to mention miniature paintings, were not observed in the same way as oil paintings are today, wall-mounted and accessible to observers from a self-selecting group. 1 Hārūn al-Rashīd in the ḥammām The illustration of the nineteenth discourse of Makhzan al-asrār in the Or.6810 Khamsa depicts Hārūn al-Rashīd in the ḥammām or bathhouse. The episode in the text recounts caliph Hārūn al-Rashīd leaving his wife in bed one night to go to the ḥammām, where the barber giving the caliph a shave asks him if he may marry his daughter. Though annoyed, Hārūn al-Rashīd tolerates the barber’s impropriety and assumes that he is confused because of the heat of the bath. The caliph goes to the bath several times after this incident whence the barber repeats his request. When the caliph consults his adviser about the barber’s curious behavior, the adviser suggests the barber might be standing over some sort of treasure, and therefore consider himself equal to the caliph. He tells the latter to sit somewhere else in the ḥammām to see if the barber then acts differently. On his return to the ḥammām the caliph changes his routine place and, as his adviser predicted, the barber, moved from his previous spot, assumes the humble and submissive stance befitting his position. After digging under the floor where the barber had formerly been standing, treasure is indeed discovered.7 7 Niẓamī, Makhzan al-asrār, 248–250. This summary cannot, of course, include every significant detail of the episodes. For the effect of summaries, see Kīlīṭū, “Masʾalat al-Qiraʾa,” 19–20. Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting 19 The painter depicts the scene in the ḥammām by illustrating two bathing rooms with an entrance beyond the frame.8 A group of men in the first room, the changing room adjacent to the entrance, are preparing to bathe, while in the second room, the bathing room, Hārūn al-Rashīd is seated with the barber shaving his head. The viewer’s attention is drawn primarily to the figures in the changing room, where there are also three servants—one washing towels which a second hangs on a clothesline and a third who is helping a bather undress. In addition to these servants, a bather prepares to bathe. Towards one end of the room an old man is seated in full dress. Less movement is depicted in the bathing room, where Hārūn al-Rashīd is shown with the barber and two static servants (Fig. 2.1). Seen together, both chambers represent one major action. Some minor activities are taking place in the changing room, such as the bathers’ washing and undressing, but there is also a focal point that attracts the observer’s eye to the upper part of the room: the stick the servant uses to hang the towels on the clothesline. The slant of the stick redirects the eye and leads the viewer to the towels. The gaze of the old man sitting at the side of the room is also directed towards the hanging towels. Taken together all these elements render the hanging of the towels more visually arresting than the figure of the caliph. When comparing our painting to a painting of the same scene, probably produced in Shiraz in 1439/40 and kept in the Uppsala University Library under O Vet.82, the caliph and the barber sit in a single bathing room with no additional room attached (Fig. 2.2).9 The question arises: why should the later Timurid work have added a room to the bath and then drawn the observer’s attention to it? The bathers, servants and hanging towels could just be typical features of ḥammām décor, but scholars are not satisfied with such an explanation. Robert Hillenbrand sees the hanging towels as the main feature, more important than the caliph.10 Following this line of argumentation, this study considers the image of the hanging towels the major focus within the composition. As mentioned above, a further means of redirecting the viewer’s attention to the towels is through the old man sitting in the corner of the room. The man’s gaze connects him to the towels, marking him out and lending him importance 8 9 10 The reference to a painter is just a matter of convenience, as there could easily have been a group of painters. As is well known, the most famous painter of the Late Timurid school is Kamāl al-dīn Bihzād; however, given that style is outside the focus of this study, attribution will not be considered. For Bihzād and his painting, see Roxburgh, “Kamal al-Din Bihzad,” 119–146. Ådahl, A Khamsa, 68. Hillenbrand, “Uses of Space,” 84. 20 Figure 2.1 Hārūn al-Rashīd in the ḥammām, Khamsa Or.6810, (folio 27b) Chapter 2 Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting figure 2.2 Hārūn al-Rashīd in the ḥammām, Khamsa, O Vet. Uppsala University Library, Shiraz 1439/40, (folio 33.r) 21 22 Chapter 2 in the composition. Who is he then? The suggestion that he is a ḥammām servant, or even its manager, is unlikely since the long sleeves covering his hands are not appropriate attire for someone working in a ḥammām.11 The man is looking at the towels hanging in the upper part of the changing room. In so doing he focuses the observer’s gaze on the towels, increasing their visual allure. I would argue that the old man has a function similar to that of the focalizor in narratology, which is defined as a figure through whose eyes the reader sees or reads the events of the story. This old man is connected to the major action in the painting, i.e. the hanging of the towels. The stick creates a diagonal line that crosses the room from the lower right to the upper left corner. By creating movement that attracts the observer’s eye, the servant hanging the towels could be seen as another internal focalizor.12 Apparently the painter did not consider this hint at the towels’ symbolism sufficient and therefore added the figure of the old man as another focalizor. His gaze creates a diagonal virtual line towards the towels, while on the other side of the line is the old man himself, establishing him as the focal point. The intimated connection between the towels and the old man leads the viewer to see the towels through his eyes. Viewed in this way the towels are invested with a symbolic meaning understandable through his attributes. The old man’s thick beard and the long sleeves that cover his hands, when read in the historical and cultural context of late fifteenth-century Herat, could be symbols of a Sufi or Sufi shaykh.13 Whereas in texts, focalizors can select words that reveal their perspective, in paintings words are replaced by the illustrated attributes.14 In our painting 11 12 13 14 A ḥammām manager is arguably depicted in the painting The Dervish Collecting the Hair of His Lover from the ḥammām Floor from an illustrated manuscript of Jāmī’s Haft Awrang dated to 1556; see Simpson, Sultan Ibrahim, 106. Following Bal’s reading (Reading “Rembrandt”, 169), the combination of a line that redirects the viewer with an internal focalizor can be seen in Rembrandt’s Danae in the Hermitage. When Sufis are depicted in Late Herat painting they most commonly wear cloaks with long sleeves covering their hands; see Milstein, “Sufi Elements,” pl. 22. In the painting The Dancing of the Derwish Sufis, dated to 1490 and produced in Herat, the dervishes dancing in the middle ground are so dressed; see Bahari, Bihzad, 94. Shaykh Mahana is also dressed in a cloak with long sleeves in Shaikh Mahana Meets a Peasant, as is the shaykh who welcomes the grieving son in The Son Who Grieves His Father’s Death (Fig. 3.7), both paintings from the illustrated manuscript of Farīd al-dīn ʿAṭṭār’s Manṭiq al-ṭayr kept in the Metropolitan Museum under 63.210.49 and 63.210.35, dated to 1489; see Bahari, Bihzad, 87 and 91. Bal exemplifies the power of the textual focalizor through the story of Susanna and the Elders from the Book of Daniel, where the narrator reveals his perspective on the characters through certain word choices; see Bal, Reading “Rembrandt”, 154–155. Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting 23 the Sufi attribute hints at a Sufi narrator or, more accurately, a focalizor who suggests that the viewer should read the narrative from a Sufi perspective. This interpretation calls for an examination of the significance of the towels, which of course are only hung after having been washed. The symbolic significance of garment washing is seen from the following excerpt from the mathnavī-yi maʿnavī by Jalāl al-dīn Rūmī: The senses are the sensor for majoring the world, the unclean senses are the screen that hide the pureness. Wash your consciousness with the water of the disillusionment; you shall know that the washing of the Sufi dresses symbols that. When you will turn pure the holy spirits will turn the screen from you and join you.15 In Rūmī’s phrasing, the washing of clothes could be understood as a metaphor for the Sufi ritual whereby the faithful purifies himself so as to be exposed to holiness and perhaps truth. A mystical interpretation of the painting suggests, then, that the hanging towels symbolize purity. The mystical aspects of the story can already be found in Niẓāmī’s text where elements in the story of Hārūn al-Rashīd that may have inspired a mystical or Sufi meaning in its pictorial translation are already apparent. In what follows I attempt to track some central motifs that could be interpreted as being charged with a mystical meaning—motifs found in either the poem or the painting, and occasionally in both. 1.1 The Motif of the Treasure Discovery In the discourse preceding the story of Hārūn al-Rashīd, Niẓāmī declares his lack of interest in earthly treasures. He urges his readers to renounce the pleasures of the world: The world is the enemy of thy life; withdraw thyself from its friendship. This dark desert is a hell of burning sulphur; how happy is he who passes through it quickly. Give back this loan from heaven; give up this earth-born dust. Skillfully throw all away, that thou may own nothing and be free. He who walks proudly on this road, robs me and thee. The laws of religion call thee, listen to them; nature is not yours, abandon it. 15 Rūmī, The Mathnawi, book 4, 404. 24 Chapter 2 The laws of religion are like a breeze, receive them in thy soul. Nature is dust, abandon it to the world. Curse this world which burns the heart; throw a stone at this glass full of blood.16 Niẓāmī’s disgust with the material world and his insistence that his readers renounce the physical world testify to his denial of earthly treasures. A similar attitude surfaces in the introduction to the Makhzan al-asrār where Niẓāmī describes the journey to his heart, which entails neglect of the material world: “Escape from the senses which are the robbers. The heart knows thy road, know thou the Heart. / And he who has abandoned both worlds, receives nourishment by begging at the door of the heart.”17 Niẓāmī ends the nineteenth discourse, which precedes the story of Hārūn al-Rashīd, by referring to the treasure that reappears in the following story: “Like the heavens, I have my foot on the treasure; therefore my place is very high.”18 At the end of the story Niẓāmī describes the kind of treasure he means, when he refers to himself: “The treasure of Niẓāmī, that he broke its talisman (is), / A pure chest and glowing heart.”19 Furthermore, when Niẓāmī describes the way to his own heart in the introduction to the Makhzan al-asrār, the heart portrays itself as a treasure: “I am a treasure, but not in the purse of Qārūn. I am not with thee; neither am I outside thee.”20 Qārūn, the biblical Korah, is regarded as the emblem of a rich man punished for his violence, whom God let sink into the earth with his treasures. As Würsch explains, the mystical and real heart is not like a tangible treasure in a money bag, but is located in the soul.21 According to this interpretation it can be argued that the treasure over which the barber stands is a metaphor for spiritual fortune and has no relation to the pleasures of the earthly world. As emphasized by Hāfiẓ (d. 1390), only by relinquishing the material world can a believer advance on the spiritual path: “You who cannot go outside the house of nature, / How can you possibly 16 17 18 19 20 21 Niẓamī, Makhzan al-asrār, 243–246. The English translation is borrowed from Darab, Makhzanol Asrār, 239–242. Niẓamī, Makhzan al-asrār, 88; Darab, Makhzanol Asrār, 128. For the identity of the voice speaking to Niẓamī, see Würsch, Niẓāmīs Schatzkammer, 207. Niẓamī, Makhzan al-asrār, 247; Darab, Makhzanol Asrār, 242. The interplay between the last verse of the discourse and the verse describing the barber of the following story, who stands above a treasure in the ḥammām, is characteristic of the Makhzan al-asrār; see Würsch, Niẓāmīs Schatzkammer, 67–68 and 157–158. Niẓamī, Makhzan al-asrār, 250; Darab, Makhzanol Asrār, 244. Niẓamī, Makhzan al-asrār, 94; Darab, Makhzanol Asrār, 132. Würsch, Niẓāmīs Schatzkammer, 548–549 and 213–214. Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting 25 traverse the street of the path?”22 Did Hārūn al-Rashīd give up on the material world when he entered the ḥammām? To answer this question I first consider the significance of the ḥammām as a place worthy of concealing such a treasure. 1.2 The ḥammām Motif: a Liminal Space There are fine clothes and a crown on one side of the changing room, probably belonging to the caliph, which suggest that before uncovering the treasure he entered through the ḥammām gate, passed through the changing room and undressed. In the changing room he would have been given a towel to cover his lower body, like the other bathers, before passing to the warmest section of the bath, where he finally discovers the treasure.23 By undressing, the caliph becomes like all the bathers who shed their garments and the status they convey. Undressing returns the bather to his inherent human nature; in the ḥammām everyone becomes equal, at least in outward appearance. This quality of the baths imposes itself on the caliph too, a figure not usually identified with modesty.24 22 23 24 The verse is cited and translated in Seyed-Gohrab, “A Mystical Reading,” 182–183, alongside other examples of Persian poetry recommending that the reader reject the material world. In his essay on the legal and medical opinions on the ḥammām, the Egyptian scholar and mystic ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-Munāwī (1545–1621) stresses the gradual entrance a bather should make. First the bather should enter the changing room (maslakh), then proceed to the two middle sections (bayt awal wa bayt thānī) and last to the warmest section (bayt thālith), attached to the furnace. If bathers should cross the sections in one movement, it would cause harm to their bodies; see al-Munāwī, Kitāb al-Nuzha, 62. The similarity of the bathers is described in an anonymous verse quoted and translated by Van Gelder, “The ‘Ḥammām’,” 9–24: “the ḥammām is a place where, if people come together, scoundrels and leaders look alike” (17). Another story featuring Hārūn al-Rashīd and a treasure is mentioned in the Siyāsat-nāma by the vizier Niẓām al-Mulk (1018–1092); see Niẓām al-Mulk, The Book of Government, 144–147. The treasure motif appears in both stories: in Niẓamī’s version Hārūn al-Rashīd discovers it beneath the barber, while in Niẓām al-Mulk’s version he gives it to his subjects. In both versions Hārūn al-Rashīd has to renounce his status and overcome his anger. Hārūn al-Rashīd is also mentioned by Farīd al-dīn ʿAṭṭār in the sixteenth discourse of the Ilāhī-nāma, which concerns death. First ʿAṭṭār tells a story about a son of Hārūn al-Rashīd who, after learning of death in general, abandons the palace and wanders out of his father’s sight. Before his father’s death the son sends him a message using these words: “How long wilt thou be plagued with the world? Rather follow the Faith that thou mayst be content. / For the world is a curtain before thy soul, but the Faith is the candle of thy belief. / If thou seize the kingdom of the whole world it will settle on top of thee when thou art dead. / Thou art a delicate man reared in luxury; accustom thyself to carrying the loads of others.” See Boyle, Ilāhī-nama, 244; see also ʿAṭṭār, Ilāhī-nama, 263. After this story ʿAṭṭār tells of Hārūn al-Rashīd and Bahlūl, a mad man wandering the streets of the capital. When Bhalūl met Hārūn al-Rashīd he called him by his name directly, without any shame, and when the caliph 26 Chapter 2 The undressing could symbolize a similar detachment from the material world as described in the preceding discourse, whereby spiritual treasure is only discovered after its pursuer undresses. Rūmī claims that removing clothes brings body and soul closer together: The painting on the bath walls are like the clothes in the changing room.25 You will see only clothes when being outside. Undress my friend and come in. With your clothes you cannot enter there, Because your body is covered from your soul, and is not aware of it.26 25 26 confronted him, he replied that he knew the caliph well and even held him responsible for many of his subjects’ troubles. The caliph lamented his situation and asked the mad man what to do, and he answered: “O thou whose feet are firmly planted in the world, the signs of the people of hell are plainly visible on thee. / Remove those signs from thy face, otherwise I have spoken and depart. Thou know what will befall.” See Boyle, Ilāhī-nama, 246; ʿAṭṭār, Ilāhī-nama, 265–266. The narrator of the Ilāhī-nama summarizes the story: “Since neither king nor kingdom is here [for ever], thou shalt be saved only if thou perish.” See Boyle, Ilāhī-nama, 246; and ʿAṭṭār, Ilāhī-nama, 266. Here Hārūn al-Rashīd is part of a genre or topos in which figures from the past with known attributes get interwoven in new discourses. In Makhzan al-asrār, Sanjar, Khosrau Anūshiravān and Hārūn al-Rashīd are examples of those figures, each with his own well-established traits. In the fifth story told by the princes to Bahrām Gūr in the Haft Paykar, paintings in baths are also described as covering the raw material. In this story Māhān, aroused during his nighttime travels, falls in love with a beautiful queen. When Māhān tries to kiss the beautiful woman she transforms into a monster. Niẓamī compares her outer beauty to the paintings in the baths: “If from this bathhouse they’d but strip the skin, none loves a stove / rubbish-heap”; see Meisami, The Haft Paykar, v. 411. Paintings of pleasant scenes on the walls are one of the seventeen requirements of a good ḥammām ʿAbd al-Raʾūf al-Munāwī enumerates in his essay the legal and medical opinions concerning the ḥammām. The paintings could be subdivided into three categories according to the human soul to which they appealed: spiritual or mental (nafsānī), animal (hayawānī) and natural (ṭabīʿī). The mental soul is stimulated by pictures of lovers, the natural soul by pictures of gardens, trees and flowers, and the animal soul by fighting heroes and knights; see al-Munāwī, Kitāb al-Nuzha, 60; and Van Gelder, “The ‘Ḥammām’,” 13–14. The verses are quoted in Milstein, “Sufi Elements,” 99. In Muḥammad Mathnawī Khān’s Thawāqib Manāqib, many stories from the life of Jalāl al-dīn Rūmī and his followers take place in bathhouses. Milstein (Religious Painting, 98) summarizes some of them: “Mawlānā felt spiritually ill, like he was polluted by soulless people, therefore he felt the need to rejuvenate himself and recover in the bath. On another occasion Mawlānā stayed in the ḥammām for three days and received holy inspiration. Once he stayed in a private cell in the bath and his body expanded from the inspiration such that he filled the whole cell.” Translated from Hebrew by the author. Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting 27 Rūmī makes a parallel between the body and the ḥammām when he says that the paintings that cover the walls of the bath are like clothes covering the body. Just as the core of the wall is revealed when the plaster is stripped away, so too disrobing reveals the body. Additional metaphors of a warm environment for the body or its parts are found in the well-known Sufi text Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ that compares the body to a city, a ship, a riding animal, a seed field and a house. When the body is compared to the house, the heart becomes the winter chamber, heated by its own warmth.27 In the epilogue to Makhzan al-asrār the narrator embarks on a journey into his heart to develop his potential qualities.28 The same could be said about Hārūn al-Rashīd’s entrance into the ḥammām: he is approaching the heated inner room on one level and his inner soul on another.29 Only in this inner chamber does he discover the nature of the treasure. Moreover, the ḥammām as a site of revealed truth is a topos also found in the poetry of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Jāmī (1414–1492). In the second of the seven poems collected in his Haft Awrang, Jāmī describes shaykh Abū ʿAlī Rudbārī seeing a Sufi in the bathhouse astonished by the beauty of a young bather. In adoration the Sufi collects the youth’s newly cut hair, dries his body with perfumed towels, and follows him out of the bath. Despite all the admiration, however, the handsome youth pays no attention to him. Finally, the frustrated Sufi asks what he can do to gain his attention, and the youth replies: “I do not give my attention to the living, you should die to get my attention.” Hearing this, the Sufi dies on the spot, but even in death the youth pays him no mind. Several years later shaykh Abū ʿAlī Rudbāri meets the youth on a pilgrimage to Mecca, where the youth reveals that ever since the Sufi died in front of him, he has dedicated his life to humility and the quest for truth.30 In this story the ḥammām is the site where enlightenment enters the beautiful youth’s soul and the place through which one discovers the treasure. A similar revelation of truth in a ḥammām, which possibly influenced Jāmī’s tale, is told by Farīd al-dīn 27 28 29 30 Würsch, Niẓāmīs Schatzkammer, 212–213. Würsch, Niẓāmīs Schatzkammer, 207–214; Seyed-Gohrab, “A Mystical Reading,” 186. In the painting Hārūn al-Rashīd is seated in the warmest room in the ḥammām, made evident by the three windows behind him. Such windows let the steam flow from the stove to the hottest room, and they are open in the wall which separate the furnaces from the ḥammām, as can be seen in the ḥammām of Haji Sarwar in Herat; see Najimi, Herat, 48, fig. 3.15, in particular sect. A-A. See Jāmī, Haft Awrang, 223–224. 28 Chapter 2 ʿAṭṭār in his Ilāhī-nāma.31 In Khusrau Dehlavī’s Khamsa as well, a bath-stoker falls in love with a bathing king and in his frustration falls into the flames.32 If this topos constitutes a tradition of thought, then in Sufi Persian poetry the ḥammām becomes a departure point from which Sufis can seek the meaning of life. What gives the ḥammām this role? The space contains contradictory elements—water and fire, pleasure and pain, disparity and unity in terms of class structure—and has often been compared to both heaven and hell.33 The ḥammām, moreover, is a kind of a liminal space or barzakh, which the Qurʾān defines as the space where people pass out of daily life to experience the shedding of their worldly symbols.34 As discussed above, undressing creates equality between the bathers. This equality is part of the reason why people of different social strata fall in love with one another in the ḥammām. The liminality of this space is sensed in ʿAbdelfattāh Kīlīṭū’s ethnographical description: The ḥammām […] is full of danger […] the danger of falling on the soppy floor could happen at any minute. Also you can pass out from the heat. Another terrifying sight you can fall to the hot water basin. Every time someone retrieves water he could slip to the limbo […] the ḥammām is a stage where you can practice for the judgment day.”35 He describes further: The ḥammām […] dictates the equality, that precursor the judgment day equality, the day in which no body can benefit from a degree, status or other virtue. [It is] equality in front of God, equality in front of death. To visit the ḥammām means to die a bit, to try at death. The ḥammām is a decrease to another world. Nobody ascend to a ḥammām but descend […] it is an underground world, it is dark, there is no star or sun in it, it is out of the world of the day and the night, it is out of the time system and the calendar.36 31 32 33 34 35 36 In the Ilāhī-nāma the narrator, the same shaykh Abū ʿAlī Rudbārī, meets the youth in the desert, not the Kaʿba. After the Sufi’s death the youth had gone out to the desert to seek truth. See ʿAṭṭār, Ilāhī-nāma, 295–298; and Davis, “Sufism and Poetry,” 286–287. Seyller, “Pearls of the Parrot,” 48. Van Gelder, “The ‘Ḥammām’,” 9–10. See Bashir, “Barzakh.” Kīlīṭū, Hiṣān Nītshi, 69. Translated by the author. Kīlīṭū, Hiṣān Nītshi, 70. Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting 29 And further still: When the bather comes out of the ḥammām, he ascends from the bottom world to the sun world, he experiences resurrection after death.37 Kīlīṭū describes the ḥammām as a liminal space where the bather meets death. This liminal world is also illustrated in the painting, as the doorway is beyond the frame. From one side this doorway is on the margin, while on the other side it is attached to the changing room, and thus connects the ḥammām with the outer world. As gateways connect different, sometimes even paradoxical, spaces, such as the passage from sacred to profane or from life to death, they can therefore carry symbolic charges.38 In his description of liminality in anthropology, Victor Turner writes that “liminal entities” [M]ay be disguised as monsters, wear only a strip of clothing, or even go naked, to demonstrate that as liminal beings they have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system—in short, nothing that may distinguish them from their fellow neophytes or initiands.39 Turner’s description is based on ceremonies in tribal societies and thus not strictly relevant to the current subject. But while Hārūn al-Rashīd is not participating in a rite of passage or in the kind of ceremony Turner discusses, those rituals still bear some similarity to the process the bather undergoes in the ḥammām.40 In order to bathe the caliph must undress and put his garments aside, and by putting aside his status symbols he becomes equal to the other bathers. A person’s outward appearance, as Niẓāmī remarks in the nineteenth discourse, has no importance on Judgment Day. Only one’s deeds in life count: 37 38 39 40 Kīlīṭū, Hiṣān Nītshi, 72. Van Gennep, The Rites, 20. Turner, The Ritual Process, 95. On many occasions, the ḥammām is the site where rite-of-passage ceremonies take place. Van Gelder (“The ‘Ḥammām’,” 10) summarizes some of these: “passing through the various spaces of the ḥammām is itself a rite of passage that stands for various other rites of passage, such as that from ritual uncleanness to purity, from sickness to health, from confinement and childbed to reappearance in the ordinary world, from childhood to adulthood, from being unmarried to marriage.” 30 Chapter 2 All these are like shadows, be thou like the light. If thou own everything, abandon all. This quarrelsome heretical world will write against thee with a sharp-pointed pen whatever thou doest. They will open the same door of kindness and tenderness to thee, as thou opens. Whether thy outward appearance is good or bad, thy name will be that which thou takest with thee.41 Similarly, in the sixth discourse of the Makhzan al-asrār, Niẓāmī writes that outward appearance cannot be relied upon: Oh thou, who hast no garment better than sackcloth, authority comes not from silk and brocade. The beauty of the gazelle is in the roughness of its skin; therefore it is chosen to carry messages of love. Musk remains in rough parchment and escapes from silk.42 In the Haft Paykar too, the prophet on his heavenly journey is described in a process of detachment from the natural world. He leaves behind his material existence over the seven stages of his night journey. At each stage he sheds one aspect of his material being until he has totally divested himself of all worldly articles.43 Thus Hārūn al-Rashīd in the ḥammām, like the afore-mentioned initiands at a tribal ceremony, is stripped of status symbols. And again like the initiands, who undergo a change after the ceremony, Hārūn al-Rashīd also changes physically and spiritually after leaving the ḥammām. In late-fifteenth-century Herat, where the episode was illustrated, the transformation might have symbolized a spiritual journey that paralleled the Sufi’s journey, at the end of which lies truth. One of the last stations on the mystical path is maʿrifa, gnosis. The treasure found under the ḥammām floor, over which the barber was first standing, could thus be a metaphor for this divine mystery.44 41 42 43 44 Niẓamī, Makhzan al-asrār, 245–246; Darab, Makhzanol Asrār, 241–242. Niẓamī, Makhzan al-asrār, 154; Darab, Makhzanol Asrār, 176. Seyed-Gohrab, “A Mystical Reading,” 191–192. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions, 130. The awareness of the divine mystery is common to all of the Sufi orders (ṭuruq), including the popular order in late fifteenth-century Herat, the Naqshbandiyya. On the popularity of the Naqshbandiyya order in Herat, see Gross, “Authority,” 159–163; and Gross, “Naqshbandi,” 117. Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting 31 1.3 The Night Motif: Hārūn al-Rashīd’s Nighttime Entry to the ḥammām In the beginning of the story, Niẓāmī conjures a specific timeframe: “In the middle of one night he gave his back to his wife, and stepped to the pleasure of the bath.”45 As the preface to the Makhzan al-asrār makes clear, night is also the hour Niẓāmī starts off on his journey to his own heart: “It was a moonless night in complete darkness”.46 Moreover, the stories heard by Bahrām Gūr, the hero of Niẓāmī’s Haft Paykar, are told at night. During the day Bahrām Gūr visits the seven palaces and enjoys a banquet, and when night falls he listens to the princesses’ stories.47 One of these, about the handsome Egyptian youth Māhān, takes place at night. The story has Māhān lose his way at night and enter a world of fairies and demons where he is unable to resist temptation. One night the lost Māhān falls in love with a queen and is tempted to make love with her. When he begins to act on his desires, however, the queen transforms into a monster and Māhān flees. In his flight he meets Khiḍr who guides him out of the labyrinth where he was trapped.48 Another aspect of nighttime is mentioned by Kīlīṭū in his examination of the fifth maqāma (discourse) of al-Ḥarīrī’s Maqāmāt, which starts at night and ends at daybreak. At night, with no sun to distinguish the false from the true, Abū Zayd, the Maqāmāt hero, can tell false stories. Abū Zayd thus operates under night cover. One night he invents a story in which he describes the poverty that led him to abandon home and family. Moved by his sad tale the listeners give him money. When the sun comes up, he tells al-Hārith, the narrator, that in fact he has no children but fabricated the story to procure money.49 Furthermore, in painting as in text, the night is the stage for imaginary events, such as in the illustration of the meeting of Iskandar and the dervish 45 46 47 48 49 Niẓamī, Makhzan al-asrār, 248. Translated by the author. Niẓamī, Makhzan al-asrār, 87. For the journey to his heart and what Niẓamī describes there, see Würsch, Niẓāmīs Schatzkammer, 207–214. See Meisami, The Haft Paykar, 105, 132, 145, 158, 174, 197, and 216. Meisami, The Haft Paykar, 174–197; Meisami, “The Theme of the Journey,” 155–172, 159–160. Khaḍir (pronounced Khiḍr in Persian) is primarily associated with the Quranic story in sura 18.59–81, where Mūsā and his servant embark on a journey and meet a servant of God who will guide them. While travelling, the servant of God performs strange deeds about which Mūsā inquires, but the reply is deferred until the journey’s end. This servant of God, called Khaḍir by the majority of the Qurʾān commentators, developed in medieval Muslim literature, both Arabic and Persian, into the guide to the water of life, that is, to immortality. See Wensinck, “Khaḍir,”; and Franke, Begegnung mit Khadir, 60–62. Kīlīṭū, Al-Ghāʾib, 17–26. In the One Thousand Nights as well, Shahrazād tells her stories to Shahrayār at night but stops when the sun rises and Shahrayār returns to reality as a ruler; see Kīlīṭū, Al-Ghāʾib, 11–13. 32 Chapter 2 from the Khamsa manuscript Or.681050 and the painting entitled The Dream of ʿAlī Shīr in an illustrated manuscript of the same ʿAlī Shīr’s Sadd-i Iskandarī.51 Events in both stories deviate from reality: in the Khamsa Iskandar meets a dervish with supernatural powers who helps him conquer a strong fortress;52 in the Sadd-i Iskandarī ʿAlī Shīr dreams about a meeting with the past poets of Persia, a meeting impossible in reality. The symbolism of night suggests that the visit of Hārūn al-Rashīd to the ḥammām occurred at night because of the supernatural nature of that hour. This interpretation hints at the mystical meaning of the story and at a possible mystical reading of the illustration. 1.4 Secrets behind the Curtain The curtain that separates the two rooms of the ḥammām may symbolize the curtain concealing a mystical secret. A metaphoric curtain that hides secrets is described in the eighteenth parable of the Makhzan al-asrār, where a youth keeps the king’s secrets: The devotees do not relate in the day what they see in the night, oh how strange! Therefore this starry dome will not tell by day what it sees by night. If thou hast been instructed behind this veil, do not repeat by day what thou hast seen by night.53 Niẓāmī writes further about secrets behind curtains in the sixth parable of the Makhzan al-asrār entitled “On the Importance of Creation”: There is an artist behind this curtain; otherwise who could have shown these scenes on it? Make the eye of the heart familiar with this curtain to perceive that which come from behind this veil. Behind this blue curtain, he has countless instruments.54 50 51 52 53 54 See Bahari, Bihzad, 155. Barry, Figurative Art, 252 and 68. Niẓamī, Sharafnāma, 319–323. Niẓamī, Makhzan al-asrār, 241; Darab, Makhzanol Asrār, 237. Niẓamī, Makhzan al-asrār, 152, Darab, Makhzanol Asrār, 174. Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting 33 The blue curtain is a metaphor for the sky, and the artist is God who is playing with shadow puppets. Only the heart can know what is happening behind the curtain.55 To summarize, the towel and the gaze in its direction by the figure of an old man, signifying the focalizor, are hints that allow a Sufi interpretation of the illustration. Moreover, the time, night, and space, ḥammām, where the scene takes place, may also carry mystical meaning, where mystical events, disconnected from physical reality, are possible. Similar hints are hidden in another painting, probably produced in the same atelier, examined below. 2 The King Who Turned into a Parrot As with Niẓāmī’s Haft Paykar, in the Hasht Bihisht of Amīr Khusrau Dehlavī (d. 1325), Bahrām Gūr also visits seven palaces where he hears stories told by princesses from seven countries.56 In the fourth palace, the green one, he is told a story about a just Indian king who used to greet every visitor to his kingdom. At a banquet one day he meets a magician with the ability to transfer his soul into another body. The magician teaches the king his magic and the king foolishly teaches it to his vizier. The cunning vizier asks the king to perform the trick before him and to transfer his soul into a dead deer. Once the king’s soul is in the deer, the vizier’s soul enters the king’s body, and thus the vizier becomes the king. Realizing what has happened, the real king transfers his soul to a parrot but is soon caught by a hunter on his way to the market. As they enter the market, they hear a prostitute yelling at a money-changer who, according to her dream, spent the night with her without paying. A crowd attempting to solve the conflict gathers around the two when the parrot-king has an idea. He suggests that the money-changer count the money he allegedly owes in front of a mirror and pass the mirror reflection to the prostitute as payment, since her dream does not reflect reality. The crowd is astonished by the wise parrot and the story reaches the Harem. As a result, one of the king’s wives buys the parrot. The parrot-king reveals his true identity to the woman and asks that she request the king-vizier perform the magical soul transference in front of her. 55 56 Würsch, Niẓāmīs Schatzkammer, 45. Amīr Khusrau Dehlavī refers to Niẓamī in his work and engages with the same thematic as Niẓamī. For a comparison between the Hasht Bihisht and the Haft Paykar, as well as between the fourth story in the Hasht Bihisht and the first in the Haft Paykar, see Mahdjoub, “Hasht Bihisht,” 346–387. 34 Chapter 2 When the king-vizier enters a dead bird, the true king returns to his real body and kills the bird-vizier.57 The painting illustrating the scene from a copy of Amīr Khusrau Dehlavī’s Hasht Bihisht dated to 1485, attributed to the Late Timurid school,58 depicts the moment when the money-changer is counting money in front of the mirror. The figure, dressed in a green cloak, is seated on a platform. Just opposite him sits the prostitute, dressed in a low-cut yellow robe. Her gaze is directed towards a woman sitting to her right, holding her hand to her cheek in astonishment. Another woman, wrapped in a white scarf, stands to the right of the prostitute. On the opposite side stands a man dressed in a blue cloak, leaning on a stick. Between the money-changer and the prostitute, in the background, sits an old man in a blue cloak that covers a black inner garment. In the foreground sits the hunter holding the parrot as he faces the arguing couple (Fig. 2.3). One noteworthy figure in the painting is the old man in blue. He is dressed in a cloak with long sleeves, one of which covers his hand. He wears a turban and his gaze is directed towards the observer. Though the old man does not appear in the text, he invites the viewer’s attention, as he occupies a central place and directs his gaze outwards. Indeed, the centrality of this figure is intriguing in itself. Barbara Brend suggests that the old man is a creation of the painter who introduced this figure to challenge the honesty and morality of the observer.59 In other words, the old man’s gaze arouses the conscience of his observers, making them ponder the essence of the story. If this is so, the old man can be seen as a focalizor, directing the observer to a certain interpretation. In this case, the focalizor’s role differs from that in the scene of Hārūn al-Rashīd in the ḥammām, since here the old man looks not at a specific object within the painting, but out to the observer who should read the story through his eyes. In Bal’s reasoning, this case offers an encounter between the viewer and the internal focalizor, the old man.60 Like the figure of the focalizor in the ḥammām, though, this old man is dressed in a Sufi manner. It thus seems that the interpretation to which the painter alludes has Sufi overtones. If the painter did indeed intend to portray a Sufi scene, then it would be reasonable to investigate the mystical elements of the story of the parrot-king. Further Sufi motifs can be found in the story and painting. The mirror scene that takes such a central place in the painting is an evident allusion to Sufi 57 58 59 60 Khusrau Dehlavī, Hasht Bihisht, 140–164; Mahdjoub, “Hasht Bihisht,” 366–368; Brend, Perspectives, 27–28. Brend, Perspectives, 173–174. Brend, Perspectives, 173. Bal, Reading “Rembrandt”, 161. Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting Figure 2.3 The king who turned into a parrot, Khamsa of Amīr Khusrau, Per.163, Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, (folio 209b) 35 36 Chapter 2 ideas. In Sufi tradition, the mirror is a metaphor for the Sufi heart. When pure, the heart reflects the divine light, just like a mirror.61 Accordingly, the mirror does not only serve to reflect the money in dispute, but also works to reflect the truth. As long as the glass is dirty, it will continue to reflect the unrealistic claims of the impure prostitute. As has already been noted, the painting underscores the eye contact between the Sufi mystical leader and the observer. It can even be claimed that the mystic is stepping out of the frame, so to speak, and communicating with the observer. ‘Talking’ with his observers, the mystic leader exhorts them to polish their inner mirrors through piety, which could be helpful in the coming world. A close reading of the poem, though, suggests that the mystic leader at the same time reminds the viewer that death is unavoidable, as the parrot-king understood: upon meeting the magician who would teach him soul transference, the king sighs: “I have acquired all the wonderful skills of this world, but I have no remedy for death.”62 The magician replies that he has the ability to make the body but a replaceable vessel, thus assuring the immortality of the soul. In time, though, the king learns that immortality is not to be sought in the present world. The figure of the old man hints at this layer in the story where the poet claims that only after physical death does immortality take place. Immortality is often connected to the figure of Khiḍr, the guide to the water of life and thus to immortality. Khiḍr literally means evergreen, and this association links his figure to the story dominated by the color green: for example, the parrot is green, and the story itself is recounted to Bahrām Gūr in the green palace. Further links between the parrot and Khiḍr are found in the Manṭiq al-ṭayr of ʿAṭṭār, as when the parrot in that text responds to the hoopoe about seeking the path to the Simurgh: “I’m the Khiḍr of the birds, thus I’m dressed in green, when I will be able to drink from the water of life?”63 The well-known Persian story about Iskandar might be an influence on Amīr Khusrau’s story as well, for Khiḍr guides Iskandar to the water of life.64 Like the parrot-king, Iskandar seeks immortality and comes to understand, at least in the mystical versions of the story, that immortality cannot exist on an earthly plane.65 61 62 63 64 65 Schimmel, Deciphering the Signs, 31. Khusrau Dehlavī, Hasht Bihisht, 143, v. 1411. ʿAṭṭār, Manṭiq al-Ṭayr, 51. For Khiḍr as Iskandar’s guide, see Franke, “Drinking from the Water of Life,” 107–114. When Iskandar realizes his helplessness before death, he instructs his men to extend his empty hand out of the coffin for all to see that he had gained nothing by the end; see Southgate, “Portrait of Alexander,” 281. Another allusion to Khiḍr could be found in the Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting 37 To conclude, it can be said that the man whose gaze is directed towards viewers of the painting urges them, as good Sufis, to polish and nourish their hearts for the sake of salvation. 3 The Garden Master and the Maidens The more obvious and unambiguous features in a painting do not typically attract the observer’s attention, while hidden or barely discernible figures allure. I argue that one such figure is standing in one of the paintings depicting the scene of the garden master and the maidens from illustrated manuscript Or.6810 of Niẓāmī’s Khamsa. (Fig. 2.4) The painting illustrates a scene from the last story from the Haft Paykar in which Bahrām Gūr listens to stories from seven princesses. The color black permeates the first story, white the last. In the white palace Bahrām Gūr hears the story of a handsome, wealthy youth who owned a lush garden. One day the youth arrives at the garden entrance and finds it closed and without a gatekeeper. His curiosity is piqued when he hears a banquet within its walls. He looks for a way in but cannot find one, so he enters through a crack in the wall. In the garden he sees a lively celebration attended by a group of beautiful maidens with silver legs and pomegranate breasts. They notice the youth and punish him for intruding on their party, but after they beat him he reveals himself as the owner of the garden. The maidens regret their hostility and propose that in compensation he watch them from a balcony, select one of them and make love to her. Passion flames in the youth while watching the women swimming naked in the pool. From a small crack in the balcony wall, he beholds the maidens in their beauty, resembling the houri in paradise. He falls in love with one of them and asks her to join him. Once in the room she too falls in love, and they give in to their passions, but at the height of their lovemaking the brick balcony cracks and collapses. The maidens blame the chosen girl for the calamity and urge the youth to try again in another spot. The couple climbs a tree and join together on a wide branch, but soon after a wild cat jumps up after a bird and knocks down their branch. The couple is again separated, but the maidens do not give up, and convince the youth to try yet again. When the couple once again reunites in a garden, a mouse nibbles the stem of a pumpkin, which falls on the ground and disturbs them. They find a cave shaded by magician’s responses, as when he refuses the fortune the king promises him: “The wise man said: gold is like dust, My art is a sufficient treasury. / Who understood the chemistry of the soul, What can the gold do to his hurt?” See Khusrau Dehlavī, Hasht Bihisht, 145. 38 Figure 2.4 The garden master and the maidens, Khamsa Or.6810, (folio 190a) Chapter 2 Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting 39 a jasmine bush, but foxes rush out when he pushes the bush aside. After all his attempts the youth gives up and realizes that without being married to the maiden he cannot make love with her. By daylight the couple goes to the city and marries there.66 In the illustration of the scene from Khamsa Or.6810, the maidens are bathing in a pool, depicted in a courtyard near a pavilion. Behind the courtyard is a garden bearing trees and flowers. Several maidens are bathing in the pool and several more are standing beside it. On the other side of the pool sits a young man with a bare head looking at the maidens and clapping his hands. Another man standing on a balcony is seen through a crack between window shutters. He is dressed in green and wears a turban. Although this man can barely be discerned, his position in the composition is central (Fig. 2.5).67 Sarah Chapman suggests that the man in the window is in fact the owner of the garden, whom the painter mocked by placing him in an exposed place yet still hiding him. She also adds that the painter is playing a game of cat-andmouse with the observer:68 [t]he role of the Master in creating the composition, however, raises the question of how au fait the contemporary Persian viewer was expected to be with the intricacies of a painting’s structure. Did the patron of the painting in some way associate himself with the Master, and if so, is the composition a sort of coded interior joke, reflecting the patron’s power over the world around him? Yet the extraordinary “invisibility” of the detailed, precise structure makes it seem unlikely that anyone but the painter could fully appreciate it. Just how important, then, was the viewer to the conception of a Persian painting?69 Chapman’s arguments are based on the hypothesis that the man in the window is the garden master, as most research on the Late Timurid school suggests.70 The youth who sits beside the pool is, however, never discussed in the research. I would like to suggest that he might be the garden master. The young garden 66 67 68 69 70 Meisami, The Haft Paykar, 216–233. Chapman points to hidden lines that lead the eye to the man standing in the window (“Mathematics and Meaning,” 36–38). Chapman, “Mathematics and Meaning,” 37. Chapman, “Mathematics and Meaning,” 37–38. See Barry, Figurative Art, 110–113; and Lentz and Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision, 274– 275. Both studies compare the late Herat version of the scene, discussed here, with the earlier version. In the earlier version there is no youth by the pool, but the garden master is still standing behind the window; see the reproduction in Barry, Figurative Art, 110. 40 Chapter 2 Figure 2.5 The garden master and the maidens, Khamsa Or.6810, (folio 190a) and drawing after Chapman, “Mathematics and Meaning” Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting 41 Figure 2.6 Details of The garden master and the maidens, Khamsa Or.6810, (folio 190a) master described in the story is wealthy; the crown placed atop a pile of clothes to the side of the pool could be his. If the owner of the garden also owns the clothes and crown, he could be the youth beside the pool without the headdress. The crown is even more likely to be his given that the man in the window is already wearing a turban. The man beside the pool, moreover, is beardless, which may suggest his youthfulness in distinction to the bearded and probably older man in the window. Who is then the man in the window? (Fig. 2.6) Though the window shutters hide most of the man’s body, he attracts the observer’s attention first through his central position in the composition and secondly through his outward gaze. The eye contact with the observer recalls the similar technique in the painting of the money-changer and the prostitute, and suggests that this figure functions as a focalizor. The old man is dressed in a green cloak and turban and has a beard. He might represent a Sufi, but this is less obvious than in the two previous paintings. Since his full body cannot be seen, the viewer cannot discern whether the sleeves cover his hands. But if this man is indeed a Sufi functioning as a focalizor, the painting should be observed through his gaze, that is, from a Sufi perspective. The painter, then, would have 42 Chapter 2 translated the story of the garden master and the maidens into a Sufi love story and left the coded figure in the window as a clue to this interpretation. Besides the painterly inventions that might communicate a mystical subtext, Niẓāmī’s text already lays a foundation for such an interpretation. The garden where the story is situated and, indeed, the love story itself, may both have esoteric significance. 3.1 The Garden Rūmī claims that perfect beauty gives rise to eternal love, as God says in the Qurʾān: “I was a hidden treasure and wanted to be revealed.”71 Moreover, nature and the created world are signs that humans should read and understand.72 In mystical poetry, then, the garden is where Sufis seek enlightenment, since the garden represents the physical expression of divine beauty, which the Sufi can sense through the garden’s delights.73 This view derives from several Qurʾān verses, one of which reads: Unto Allah belongeth the Sovereignty of the heavens and the earth. Allah is Able to do all things. Lo! In the creation of the heavens and the earth and (in) the difference of night and day are tokens (of his sovereignty) for men of understanding. Such as remember Allah, standing, sitting, and reclining, and consider the creation of the heavens and the earth, (and say): Our Lord! Thou createdst not this in vain. Glory be to Thee! Preserve us from the doom of Fire.74 Paradise is the ideal garden and the source of inspiration for the garden scene in the Persian poem. Thus the beautiful maidens are compared to the virgins in paradise, Ḥūr al-ʿAyn, the pool will be named the Kawthar pool, the great pool of paradise, the gatekeeper will be called Raḍwān like his counterpart at the gates of paradise, and the garden’s large tree will be compared to the great ṭūbā tree in paradise.75 Likewise, the garden that the master enters in Niẓāmī’s story is also surrounded by a wall with a gatekeeper, as in paradise. The maidens in the garden also resemble the virgins in paradise, as described in several passages of the Qurʾān: 71 72 73 74 75 Schimmel, The Triumphal Sun, 334. Khairallah, The Triumphal Sun, 105. Subtelny, “The Traces of the Traces,” 21. Qurʾān 3:189–191. All citations of the Qurʾān follow Pickthall, The Meaning of The Glorious Koran. Hanaway, “Paradise on Earth,” 46; Schimmel, Deciphering the Signs, 20. Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting 43 And the foremost in the race, the foremost in the race: Those are they who will be brought nigh. In gardens of delight; A multitude of those of old. And a few of those of later time, on lined couches, Reclining therein face to face. There wait on them immortal youths, with bowls and ewers and a cup from a pure spring. Wherefrom they get no aching of the head nor any madness, And fruit that they prefer, And flesh of fowls that they desire. And (there are) fair ones with wide, lovely eyes, Like unto hidden pearls, Reward for what they used to do. There hear they no vain speaking nor recrimination, (Naught) but the saying: Peace (and again) Peace. And those on the right hand; what of those on the right hand? Qurʾān 56:10–27 And with them are those of modest gaze, with lovely eyes, (Pure) as they were hidden eggs (of the ostrich) Qurʾān 37:48–49 Therein are those of modest gaze, whom neither man nor jinni will have touched before them, which is it, of the favors of your Lord, that ye deny? (In beauty) like the jacinth and the coral-stone Qurʾān 55:56–58 Compare the similar language Niẓāmī uses to describe the maidens celebrating in the garden: Through this hole’s fount the master spied, rosy-faced maids with narrow eyes. On every side were roses strewn: sweet pomegranate-breasts, and limbs Of silver had those maids, who lit, the eyes’ lamps; sweeter than ripe fruit. Pomegranate breasts, and chins like sweet, cleft apples which were out of reach.76 There was a pool of marble there, to which Kawthar could not compare.77 When the maidens ask the master about his choice, they continue the rhetoric of paradise: “Amongst these idols, houri-born, to which of them do you incline?”78 These verses reveal the garden and the beautiful maidens as a manifestation of God’s glory, which a Sufi could sense through them. 76 77 78 Niẓamī, Haft Paykar, 301; Meisami, The Haft Paykar, 221. Niẓamī, Haft Paykar, 301; Meisami, The Haft Paykar, 222. Niẓamī, Haft Paykar, 304; Meisami, The Haft Paykar, 224. 44 Chapter 2 Meisami reads the Haft Paykar as a circle that begins when Bahrām Gūr slays the dragon and enters the cave, an action that, for her, “symbolizes the beginning of his spiritual quest” that ends when he disappears in the cave, thereby completing the circle.79 Meisami moreover claims the seven stories, and their conclusion, have allegorical charge: [t]he completion of this circle would not be possible without the tales, which prepare Bahrām Gūr for the transition from kingship by will to kingship by law, and make possible his transformation from a perfect ruler in appearance to one in reality. Bahrām Gūr’s progress towards self-knowledge is mirrored by the movement in the tales from the darkness of moral ignorance (symbolized by the black of the first dome) to the light of illumination (symbolized by the white of the seventh and final dome).80 Bahrām Gūr’s journey is symbolized by the movement from one garden to another, at the end of which the young master is brought to an awareness of moral truth.81 3.2 Love The tale of the garden master and the maidens is the third and last love story Bahrām Gūr hears. In the first story a king meets a beautiful queen who lives in a fertile garden, while in the second Māhān, an Egyptian youth, falls in love with another queen who is transformed into a monster. In both stories the lovers fail to fulfill their love, and as a result the king dresses in black for the rest of his life, and Māhān dons blue in mourning. But the master of the garden wins his lover and unites with her after a long journey.82 Meisami, moreover, suggests that the garden master forged a path in which he overcame his passions and by so doing achieved illumination. The master was rewarded for his struggle against his lower soul (al-nafs al-amāra bil-sūʾ) with an earthly paradise and a heavenly paradise.83 Overcoming desire, an allegory for the domination of the nafs, could be considered a station on the Sufi path. The Sufi’s struggle with his own lower soul is described as a jihād (holy struggle) in which all the believer’s power and love are used to educate the base faculties.84 In her examination 79 80 81 82 83 84 Meisami, “The Theme of the Journey,” 163. Meisami, “The Theme of the Journey,” 164. Meisami, “Kings and Lovers,” 15. Meisami, “The Theme of the Journey,” 164. Meisami, “Kings and Lovers,” 237–238. Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions, 112–113 and 141. Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting 45 of the garden as an expression of divine beauty in Rūmī’s poetry, Schimmel describes a similar struggle: [t]here is no end to this kind of spring song in Rumi’s poetry. But he knows also that the prerequisite for fine harvest is that the garden be tended carefully; its earth must be softened, the stones removed. Only when the seeker on the Path becomes like dust, breaking his stone-like nature under the constant blows of affliction, can roses grow out of him; only when the last trace of self-will and self-expression, the last ‘snow of words’ has disappeared, is the way to the rose garden of union open.85 Only after the murīd (the Sufi on the Path) overcomes his desires can he go on his way. The garden master passes the same path: he first struggles to enter his garden, then is beaten by the maidens and tormented on several occasions until he realizes that he must overcome his passion to unite with his love. The garden master’s struggle could be read as a Sufi’s journey towards divine knowledge. Only with humility and the repression of desire can Sufis make progress on their paths, and so too with the garden master. Nevertheless, since the painter could have furnished the story with his own interpretation, as suggested by Hillenbrand in the paragraph cited in the introduction, in just the same manner the painter of the Garden Master and the Maidens could have used Niẓāmī’s text as a platform to represent mystical content. Further features of the painting might carry Sufi significance. Two doors are illustrated in the painting: one is built into the façade beneath the inscription yā muftih al-abwāb (you who opens [the] doors) and is closed, while the second door is attached to a fence surrounding the courtyard and is partly open to the garden beyond it. Milstein suggests that the open gate and the inscription are clues to a deeper meaning within the painting.86 Based on her interpretation, it can be argued that the key to this deeper level of meaning is hinted at by the man behind the window shutters. If this man is a Sufi functioning as a focalizor, as proposed above, then he could be associated with the saying that is directed at the prayer’s recipient and could be read as a reference to the door’s opener, i.e. God. However, it is clear that while the youth and maidens have access to the garden, the observer does not: the red railing at the edge of the frame stops any visual entry. When a similar railing was depicted in an earlier version of the scene, produced by the early Herat school, it was placed not on the edge of 85 86 Schimmel, “The Celestial Garden,” 28. Milstein, “Sufi Elements,” 336. 46 Chapter 2 Figure 2.7 The garden master and the maidens, Khamsa 1913, 13.228.13, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, (folio 47a) Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting 47 the foreground, but instead on a riverbank leaving a short strip, thus allowing observers to ‘stand’ near the garden and to enter into the painting (Fig. 2.7). Further differences between the two versions emerge—the garden master is by the pool, not in the window as in the earlier version, which necessarily changes the identity of the man standing in the window. These differences have not been treated by scholars, who generally interpret the later version as a sort of a copy.87 Though the painters of Late Herat did copy earlier illustrations in several cases, in other works the painters made considerable changes. The poets of Late Herat imitated ancient and contemporaneous texts. This kind of imitation was named tatabuʿ (following) or javāb (answering or response). The answering poem typically followed the rhyme of the original and often alluded to its stylistic choices. Competing with a poet considered impossible to imitate (mumtaniʿ al-javāb) was the ambition of every poet.88 But it seems that, unlike with poetry, the painter of the later Garden Master and the Maidens did not alter the details to differentiate it from an earlier version, but instead to furnish it with deeper meaning. Here it is worth recalling Douglas Kelly’s thoughts on literary topoi: Topical invention allowed for the adaptation of received commonplaces to new or changing subjects and audiences […]. Topoi are thus not only the adaptation of traditional material, but also the adaptation of received knowledge to a purpose.89 It seems that the Late Herat painter reworked the earlier version of the scene, adding new characters with which he introduced new meaning. Despite his having adopted a composition that emphasizes the position of the garden master, he replaced this figure with another and in so doing changed the more traditional meaning of the earlier painting and encoded within it a new mystical component. 4 Conclusion In the present chapter I concentrate in particular on an exceptional figure that stands in a central place or looks upon a central object in the painting. This figure, I argue, functions as a focalizor who invites the observer to “read” the 87 88 89 Lentz and Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision, 274. Subtelny, “A Taste for the Intricate,” 62–67. Kelly, “Translatio Studii,” 287. 48 Chapter 2 painting according to his perspective. Like textual narrators who have their own worldview through which they recount events, the attributes of pictorial focalizors can also influence the observer’s “reading.” Since the focalizors in the examined illustrations are endowed with Sufi attributes, observers should read the works with a mystical perspective in mind. The Sufi focalizor in the illustration Hārūn al-Rashīd in the ḥammām furnishes the painting with mystical meaning wherein cleansing the body and entrance to the deepest part of the ḥammām may be paralleled to the cleansing of the soul and progress to the inner heart, where the real spiritual treasure lies. Another figure acting as a focalizor, sitting between the prostitute and money-changer, urges the observer to polish his mirror, and thus his heart, since an impure heart fails to reflect divine truth. Another figure, concealed behind window shutters and gazing upon the viewer, could also act as a focalizor despite his seemingly hidden stance. This man invites beholders to overcome their passions and walk the path of truth, like the garden master who battled his lower soul in the garden of temptations.90 These figures, I suggest, might function as a specific type of focalizor, imbued with a Sufi-mystical role intelligible in the cultural context of Herat under the last Timurid sultan, Sultan Ḥusayn Bāyqarā. There is evidence that focalizors are still “hiding” in paintings produced by other schools, but these await examination against the backdrop of their respective cultural context. 90 Only one of the focalizor’s eyes can be seen in this illustration. This eye and the meaning of the figure recall what is defined as the “eye of the heart” or chashm-i dil in the mystical tradition. This eye may refer to the heart as an organ of spiritual perception and mystical knowledge. Subtelny, Le Monde est un Jardin, 137–140.