The IHF/ BL digitisation project keeps producing treasures. A recent BL blog discussed the hybrid paintings of Muhammad Zaman ibn Hajji Yusuf Qummi (fl. 1649-1704): “famous for his figures in European dress and use of night scenes and shadows”.
I’ve never much liked these hybrid pictures, but was fascinated to read a whole new way of looking at – and appreciating – them,
In her blog posting, Sims-Williams gave a link to a fascinating paper by Amy Landau.
This describes how, at Shah Sulayman’s court, Tahmasp’s sixteenth century Khamsa was extensively refurbished, with the addition of full-page paintings in a ‘Europeanized’ style. In this refurbishment, patron and artists “took possession of their artistic inheritance as they branded the manuscript with contemporary markings such as royal seals and scribal notes”.
The new paintings maintained “a dialogue with the past”, but “also clearly indicated contemporary artistic ambitions”, using “a fresh visual language”, blending Safavid artistic traditions with “adaptations of European iconography and pictorial
techniques such as linear and atmospheric perspective, modeling, and chiaroscuro”.
This fitted nicely with the international population, and all the European prints, flooding into Isfahan.
But it’s not been been appreciated by modern Western critics, who generally declare farangi-sazi to be a “lamentable failure.” It’s seen as not conforming to Persian traditions, or European standards.
But Landau sees this as epitomizing “the Orientalist mindset of a changeless ‘East’ – and as part of a construction of a false “binary opposition between European and non-European painting”. Lots of the (European) scholarship on farangi-sazi concentrates on the European ‘influences’, privileging the movement of Europeans and their goods when discussing the historical context.
An alternative approach looks at how a Safavid painter like Zaman “availed himself of European artistic idioms to pay homage to Persian literary and visual traditions”. The emphasis is “thus shifted from the passive reception of foreign influences” to a much more positive artistic agency.
Looking at the images this way, ZAman “not only interprets Nizami’s text anew but also offers a view to his own era’s notions of foreignness, gender, and kingship”.