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Satire in the Paintings of “Mohammad-e Siāh Qalam”
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2022
Abstract
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.
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Footnotes
He would also like to express his thanks to the Topkapı Palace Library, The British Museum, and the MFA, Boston, for providing permission to reproduce images of works in their collections, and to Sotheby’s for granting permission to reproduce copyrighted material.
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