Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp: A Safavid Masterpiece Manuscript

The Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp is an illustrated copy of the Persian national epic made in the royal workshop of the Safavid dynasty in Tabriz, roughly between 1522 and 1540. With 258 paintings on some 759 large folios, it is the most ambitious illustrated Persian book ever produced and a summit of Islamic painting. Given away to the Ottoman sultan in the 16th century, it was cut apart in the 20th, and its pages are now spread across the world.

The epic and the patron

The Shahnameh (“Book of Kings”) was completed by the poet Ferdowsi around 1010. In some 50,000 couplets it tells the history of Iran from the first mythical king, Gayumars, through heroes such as Rostam, down to the Arab conquest in the 7th century. Copying and illustrating it was a way for rulers of Iran to present themselves as heirs of that kingship.

The new Safavid dynasty needed such legitimacy. Its founder, Shah Ismail I, had conquered Iran after 1501. The manuscript was probably begun around 1522, when his young son Tahmasp returned to Tabriz from Herat, the old Timurid capital of painting. Tahmasp became shah in 1524 at the age of ten and the project continued under his patronage for well over a decade.

Making the manuscript

The work took place in the royal kitabkhana, a combined library and workshop for calligraphers, painters, gilders and binders. Each page measures roughly 47 by 32 centimetres. The text was written in elegant nastaliq script, with margins sprinkled with gold.

The painters brought together two traditions. From Herat came the refined, balanced style of the late Timurid master Bihzad. From Tabriz came a bolder, more fantastic Turkmen style, with swirling rocks full of hidden faces and dense, colourful vegetation. The fusion of these styles is a key reason why historians consider the manuscript so important.

The most celebrated painting is “The Court of Gayumars”, attributed to Sultan Muhammad, who probably directed the early phase of work. It shows the first king and his court dressed in leopard skins in a mountain landscape crowded with animals and figures. The painter and chronicler Dust Muhammad wrote around 1544 that it surpassed all other painting, a judgement later scholars have tended to share.

The painters

Most pages are unsigned. Only a couple of paintings bear signatures; one, by Mir Musavvir, carries a date equivalent to 1527–28. As a result attributions largely rest on stylistic study, especially the work of Stuart Cary Welch and Martin Dickson. Scholars generally name the following artists:

• Sultan Muhammad: the senior master of the early phase.
• Mir Musavvir: a leading painter of the middle phase, known for refined detail.
• Aqa Mirak: a painter and companion of the shah, associated with richly coloured scenes.
• Mirza Ali and Mir Sayyid Ali: younger artists of great precision; Mir Sayyid Ali was the son of Mir Musavvir.
• Dust Muhammad and Abd al-Samad: court painters also involved in the royal workshop.

The quality of the pages varies, because many hands worked on them over two decades. Experts see a shift from the exuberant early pages to a calmer, more polished style by the 1530s.

Tahmasp’s change of heart

By the 1540s Tahmasp began to lose interest in painting. He became increasingly devout and in 1556 issued an edict of “sincere repentance” against activities he now considered unlawful. Royal patronage of the arts declined, and the workshop scattered.

Some of its artists found new patrons. Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad met the exiled Mughal emperor Humayun, son of Babur, when he sheltered in Iran in 1544. They later followed him to India and helped found the Mughal school of painting, which flourished under Akbar.

Gift to the Ottomans

The manuscript left Iran as a diplomatic gift. After decades of war, the Safavids and Ottomans had made peace at Amasya in 1555. When Selim II succeeded his father Suleiman, Tahmasp sent a large embassy with lavish presents, among them this Shahnameh, which reached the Ottoman court at Edirne in 1568. It stayed in the Ottoman royal collections for more than three centuries.

Dispersal in the 20th century

By the early 1900s the manuscript had left Istanbul and belonged to Baron Edmond de Rothschild in Paris. In 1959 it was bought by the American collector Arthur A. Houghton Jr., which is why it is often called the Houghton Shahnameh.

Houghton broke up the book. In 1972 he gave 78 paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and other folios were sold to collectors and institutions. After his death in 1990, his heirs agreed in 1994 to exchange the remaining 118 paintings, with the binding and text pages, for a painting by Willem de Kooning held by the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. The returned pages are now in Tehran.

Scholars regret the dispersal, since the manuscript can no longer be studied as a whole. Today folios can be seen in New York, Tehran, Toronto’s Aga Khan Museum and other collections.

Timeline

• c. 1010: Ferdowsi completes the Shahnameh.
• c. 1522: Work on the royal manuscript probably begins in Tabriz.
• 1524: Tahmasp I succeeds his father Ismail I as shah.
• c. 1535–1540: The illustrated manuscript is essentially complete.
• 1556: Tahmasp issues his edict of “sincere repentance”.
• 1568: The manuscript reaches Selim II at Edirne as a diplomatic gift.
• 1959: Arthur A. Houghton Jr. buys the manuscript.
• 1994: The remaining Houghton folios and the binding return to Iran in an exchange.

Why it matters

The Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp shows Persian painting at its most ambitious, combining the traditions of Herat and Tabriz into a new Safavid style that also shaped Mughal art in India. It belongs with other Safavid masterpieces of the period, such as the Ardabil Carpet, as evidence of the cultural confidence of the dynasty founded by Ismail I. Its later fate, cut up and scattered, also became a cautionary tale in debates about how museums and collectors treat manuscripts.