Satire in the Paintings of “Mohammad-e Siāh Qalam”

Bibliographic Data

ID9979919
AuthorsJames F White (0000-0002-3385-6134, University of Oxford, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume51
Issue2
Pages213-243
Publication date2017-09-26
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueIranian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-0862 • E-ISSN: 1475-4819
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1080/00210862.2017.1374831
OpenAlexW2760779979
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited22

A considerable amount of scholarship has been produced on just over sixty paintings of humans and demons, many of which bear ascriptions to the unidentified artist Mohammad-e Siāh Qalam, and which are now mostly housed in albums H.2153 and H.2160 in the Topkapı Palace Library. Although methods of formal comparison have led to general agreement that the paintings can be dated to either the fourteenth century or the fifteenth, strikingly little attention has been paid to the question of what these images depict. This paper studies the paintings within the context of documentary, legal and literary material in Persian and Arabic, and identifies a set of common motifs shared between the Siāh Qalam paintings and a number of later images. While it has been supposed by several scholars that the paintings document life in a marginal geographical environment and faithfully reflect the practices of a syncretic culture, this paper suggests that they engage with a field of satirical ideas which were widespread in the Islamic world in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and which parodied common types of behavior that were deemed by some observers to be illicit or absurd

Arabic · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Context (archaeology · Fifteenth · Linguistics · Literature · Painting · Scholarship · Byzantine Studies and History · Classics · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy

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