Although Kamal al-Din Bihzad (1460-1535) is acknowledged to be one of the greatest masters of Persian painting, there has to date been no comprehensive study of his life and work. He flourished during the golden age of artistic achievement in the late Teimurid and early Safavid periods, working in Herat and then in Tabriz. This illustrated book traces the roots of the style developed by Bihzad, its heritage and its legacy in Iran, Mughal India and Ottoman Turkey. The author approaches the subject by attempting to relate the paintings to the stories and themes they portray, thus enabling us to appreciate Bihzad's work in a way that has generally been neglected by Western art historians. Bahari has examined Bihzad's paintings in libraries and collections all over the world and this study brings together a huge body of the work.

In terms of elucidating inner meaning and symbolism, the study of medieval Islamic art has lagged almost a full century behind that of medieval Western art. This groundbreaking work suggests how it might at last prove possible to crack the allegorical code of medieval Islamic painting during its Golden Age between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. Barry focuses his study around the work of Bihzâd, a painter who flourished in the late fifteenth century in the kingdom of Herat, now in Afghanistan. Bihzâd became the undisputed master of the “Persian miniature” and an almost mythical personality throughout Asian Islam. By carefully deciphering the visual symbols in medieval Islamic figurative art, Barry’s study deliberately takes a bold approach in order to decode the lost iconographic conventions of a civilization. The glorious illustrations, scholarly text, and extracts from Persian poetry, many translated into English for the first time, combine to create an essential new work of reference and a visual delight.

In Esoteric Images: Decoding the Late Herat School of Painting Tawfiq Daʿadli decodes the pictorial language which flourished in the city of Herat, modern Afghanistan, under the rule of the last Timurid ruler, Sultan Husayn Bayqara (r.1469-1506). This study focuses on one illustrated manuscript of a poem entitled Khamsa by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, kept in the British Library under code Or.6810. Tawfiq Daʿadli decodes the paintings, reveals the syntax behind them and thus deciphers the message of the whole manuscript. The book combines scholarly efforts to interpret theological-political lessons embedded in one of the foremost Persian schools of art against the background of the court dynamic of an influential medieval power in its final years.

Jewel-like colors, rich patterns, precise execution and virtuoso draftmanship characterize the best of Persian miniature painting: the perfect realization of an ideal world. This fully illustrated book provides a concise account of Persian painting from about 1300 to 1900. Beginning with the materials and tools which enabled the artists to achieve their remarkable effects, Sheila Canby goes on to survey the stylistic development of Persian painting and the influences upon it of over six centuries of Iran’s turbulent history.

This is a detailed study of the illustrations to Amir Khusrau's Khamsah, in which twenty discourses are followed by a brief parable, and four romances. Amir Khusrau (1253-1325) lived the greater part of adventurous life in Delhi; he composed in Persian, and also in Hindi. From the point of view of manuscript illustration, his most important work is his Khamsah (Quintet'). Khusrau's position as a link between cultures of Persia and India means that the early illustrated copies of the Khamsah have a particular interest. The first extant exemplar is from the Persian area in the late 14th century, but a case can be made that work was probably illustrated earlier in India.

While the impact of the Persian style is undeniably reflected in most aspects of the art and architecture of Islamic Central Asia, this Perso-Central Asian connection was chiefly formed and articulated by the Euro-American movement of collecting and interpreting the art and material culture of the Persian Islamic world in modern times. This had an enormous impact on the formation of scholarship and connoisseurship in Persian art, for instance, with an attempt to define the characteristics of how the Islamic art of Iran and Central Asia should be viewed and displayed at museums, and how these subjects should be researched in academia. This important historical fact, which has attracted scholarly interest only in recent years, should be treated as a serious subject of research, accepting that the abstract image of Persian art was not a pure creation of Persian civilization, but that it can be the manifestation of particular historical times and charismatic individuals. Attention should therefore be given to various factors that resulted in the shaping of “Persian” imagery across the globe, not only in terms of national ideologies, but also within the context of several protagonists, such as scholars, collectors and dealers, as well as of the objects themselves. This volume brings together Islamic Iranian and Central Asian art experts from diverse disciplinary and professional backgrounds, and intends to offer a novel insight into what is collectively known as Persian art.