Robert Shirley and the dragon-slayer

Last week I included van Dyck’s painting of Robert Shirley dressed à la Persane. This week, when I was reading the (relatively new, go read it!) Carpets and Textiles in the Iranian World 1400-1700, I was reminded of another image of him.

This is the one that was shown at the recent Shah Abbas exhibition at the British Museum, from the Berkeley collection.

Robert seems to have enjoyed wearing Persian clothes: Sir Thomas Herbert (1628) wrote how, in Iran, he was “constantly wearing the Persian habit”; while Sir Thomas Fuller noted that “he much affected to appear in foreign vestes; and, as if his Clothes were his limbs, accounted himself never ready till he had something of the Persian habit about him”.

Robert is wearing the same cloak or balapush in both portraits, but different under-robes (qaba), sashes and turbans. Canby noted that, while the material of the balapush was like the “gold-ground silks produced during the reign of Shah Abbas”, the pattern of the Berkeley qaba “relates to silks produced in the last quarter of the sixteenth century”. The pattern itself, of a man hurling a large rock onto a dragon, is the same one previously discussed in the blog as being on pieces of the Sanguszko tent (click here for the best internet image I can find).

In the previous blog, I said that the man is sometimes described as Iskander. Baker, however, has identified another story in the Shahnameh that seems much more likely to represent the dragon-slayer – that of Hushang, the first Aryan King.

Hushang was the first law-giver, in whose age agriculture, and especially animal-husbandry and irrigation, developed. Hushang also discovered how to make fire, when he was fighting a dragon. There are several lovely book-paintings of the fire-related deliberations of Hushang  (eg. click here and here); but the best text comes from the Shahnameh itself:

One day he reached a mountain with his men
And saw afar a long swift dusky form
With eyes like pools of blood and jaws whose smoke
Bedimmed the world. Hushang the wary seized
A stone, advanced and hurled it royally.
The world-consuming worm escaped, the stone
Struck on a larger, and they both were shivered.
Sparks issued and the centres flashed. The fire
Came from its stony hiding-place again
When iron knocked.

Perhaps Robert Shirley thought a depiction of Hushang on his qaba was especially pertinent, since fire led to blacksmithing and the first metalwork – and Robert has often been described as important for the formation of Shah Abbas’ artillery corps, with their matchlock or ‘fireflint’ guns.