Calligraphers and painters

Who were the creators of this painting? The painting and the text embedded in the painting can be found on folio 52v in the manuscript of the work, a copy of Bustan. As Persian is read from right to left, this implies that the painting is located on the page at the right hand side of the opened book.

Creating illustrated manuscripts was a collective effort: it involved scribes and painters, but also a bookbinder and a papermaker. Before anything else, the paper had to be prepared: sheets of paper needed to be sized and polished, before the scribe and the painter could use them. The scribe or calligrapher often included his name in the colophon at the very end of the manuscript, together with a date. This is how we know that Sultan ‘Ali Katib from Mashhad finished copying this manuscript in the month of Rajab 893, corresponding with June 1488.

The painter Kamal al-Din Bihzad (d. 1535-36) inconspicuously left his signature in a small vignette in the painting itself. Here he wrote in white letters on a blue surface: amal al-‘abd bihzad, “the work of the servant Bihzad”. His contemporaries and later generations praise Bihzad for his fine brushwork, precision and masterful representation of expressions.

Because of the harmonious organization of writing and painting, it is assumed that Sultan ‘Ali and Bihzad worked together on this particular page. Usually, however, the scribe would leave empty spaces for the painter to fill in later. The artisans and artists involved in the making of a manuscript worked in small workshops, which were part of the court.

Sultan ‘Ali’s tools were ink and the _qalam_or reed pen, cut in a special manner to facilitate the writing of nasta‘liq, sometimes described as “hanging script”, a calligraphic style that was new at the time. The tools of Bihzad were pens and styluses, and also the finest brushes, made of squirrel hair or the hair of Persian cats. His paints were made from both natural and chemical pigments. Some of the paints Bihzad used were made of minerals, such as grinded lapis lazuli and malachite, but he also used gold, to paint for example the halo of Yusuf.