Nothing about the book was ordinary, least of all its ending. Begun in the royal workshop of Tabriz around 1522 and worked on until about 1540, the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp was dismembered in New York in the 1970s. Its binding, its text block, and 118 of its paintings have been in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art since 1994; roughly 140 further illustrated leaves sit in museums and private collections from Toronto to Doha, and a few still change hands at auction.
A Safavid Capital That Inherited Two Painting Traditions
The conquests of Shah Isma'il I gave Tabriz a double inheritance. From Herat came the refined manner of the Timurid court atelier; at Tabriz itself the Aqqoyunlu, or Turkman, workshop was already long established. The project drew on both, and on two generations of artists, under the patronage of Isma'il's son Tahmasp I, who had been raised at Herat and came to the throne at eleven.
An illuminated dedication on fol. 16 places the volume in his library. Scholars have proposed that Isma'il ordered the manuscript around 1522 as a gift for the prince, though no document records the commission.
759 Folios, 258 Miniatures, and a Written Surface Under Pressure
The text is copied in an accomplished nasta'liq, the headings in riqa'. Margins are heavily sprinkled with gold. Against that regular grid, the 258 miniatures behave unpredictably: the format is conceived afresh for each one, many fill nearly the entire written surface, and some break past it into the gold of the margins. Such variation implies constant negotiation between calligraphers, painters, and the craftsmen who ruled and measured the pages.
Three Directors and a Generation of Named Hands
Sultan Muhammad, Mir Musavvir, and Aqa Mirak are thought to have supervised the work in succession, each leaving a distinct imprint on the rhythm of illustration. Individual paintings have been attributed to them and to Mirza Ali, Mir Sayyid Ali, Muzaffar Ali, Dust Muhammad, and probably Abd al-Samad, with further hands identified by style but not by name. These attributions are stylistic arguments rather than signatures, and several remain contested. The Court of Gayumars on fol. 20v and The Death of Zahhak on fol. 37v, both attributed to Sultan Muhammad, are the paintings most often placed at the center of the discussion.
A Book of Kings as an Argument About Kingship
Firdausi's epic runs from the creation of the world to the Arab conquest of Iran, and a Safavid dynasty barely two decades old had reason to claim that succession as its own. The book carries no colophon; its calligrapher is unknown, and a single date, 934 AH, appears on the folio numbered 516. In 1568 Tahmasp sent the volume to the Ottoman sultan Selim II, and in Ottoman hands it survived almost untouched for more than three centuries.
Four centuries of custody, then two decades of the art market. The leaves can still be read one by one. The book they made cannot.
We have 1 facsimile edition of the manuscript "Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp": Houghton Shahnameh facsimile edition, published by Harvard University Press, 1981
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