Here, newly digitised, is the power of painting, in a painting. Barbara Brend’s guest blog about the British Museum Khamsah of Nizami Add. 25900 discusses how this manuscript wasn’t produced in one go, for one patron. One illustration is usually considered to have been painted at the time of the colophon, in Herat: 846/1442. It shows “Shirin contemplating the picture of Khusrau” (f. 41r): “For the third time Shapur, the friend of prince Khusrau, has hung [Khusrau’s] portrait on a tree in the mountain pastures where the princess Shirin disports herself with her ladies. The ladies have destroyed the first two pictures, but Shirin, already entranced by the first picture, herself moves to take possession of the third”.
While the ladies gesture their concern, their pale, elegant faces characteristic of Herat painting in the 1440s, the face of Shirin has been repainted to show more emphatic features and the “impression of volume in India in the time of Ballantyne”, the last private owner of the manuscript. Ballantyne was a distinguished Scottish orientalist who became Librarian to the India Office, after working in India from 1845 to 1861.
In the upper left of the painting, Shapur watches the effect of the painting, perched “amongst rocks in which the painter of the 1440s has taken advantage of Chinese conventions of shading to introduce faces of grotesques, which also give an impression of volume, and thus the very opposite of the faces of the ladies”.