Assemblage Methods of the Interrelated Albums H. 2153 and H. 2160

One must note at the outset that some contents of album H. 2153 spilled over into the related companion album H. 2160, which also belonged to the Ottoman royal treasury collection at the Topkapı Palace.¹⁹ Each of these two closely connected albums follows a consistent but different assembly method. While large images were set aside for inclusion in H. 2153, some of their cropped fragments and tiny images—often labeled “khurdak” (very small)—found their way into H. 2160.²⁰ The latter album has a book format with text-block and wide margins, unlike its monumental companion, in which margins are omitted to maximize the surfaces available for mounting larger and more diverse items. Thin strips of pinkish or beige paper were often pasted into the spaces between those items to visually unify the pages. In contrast, the relatively humble H. 2160 is dominated by calligraphy specimens, which often constitute large centerpieces accompanied by a few generally smaller images. Moreover, only H. 2153 contains the European and Europeanizing works.

Both volumes received their latest binding during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909). The first and last pages (fols. 1r and 90v) of album H. 2160 are stamped with Selim I’s almond-shaped sovereignty seal, which was used only during the sultan’s reign and differs from his round treasury (hazine) seal. The latter continued to be stamped on the lock of the imperial treasury in the residential third court of the Topkapı Palace after his demise, in accordance with his will. Therefore, H. 2160, featuring two impressions of Selim I’s sovereignty seal, must have existed as an album during his reign. Album H. 2153 lacks seal impressions, which may have been lost during rebinding. It is currently detached from its binding, unlike H. 2160. Given that large-format works were preselected for H. 2153, with their scraps and smaller images preserved in H. 2160, both albums must have been created simultaneously or one right after the other. Since the latest sample of calligraphy in H. 2160 is dated 917 AH (1511–12), the large album H. 2153 likely reached its present form before Selim I passed away in 1520.²¹

However, there is no consensus on when and where these albums were compiled. Some Turkish scholars had previously named H. 2153 as the Fatih Album, after the title of Sultan Mehmed II (d. 1481), whose portraits are mounted in it, along with other Europeanizing portraits by Ottoman court painters (see fig. 1a). Instead, these two albums are now more commonly referred to as “Saray Albums” followed by their catalogue numbers H. 2153 and H. 2160. According to a hypothesis that I find unconvincing, they both arrived from Tabriz as albums and were named by some early twentieth-century scholars after the Aqqoyunlu ruler of Tabriz, Yaʿqub Beg (r. 1478–90), because most of the dated calligraphy specimens are from his reign.²² A group of paintings in these albums ascribed by inscriptions to the artists Shaykhi and Darvish Muhammad, who were associated with Yaʿqub Beg’s court, also played a role in this attribution.²³ The priority given to dated calligraphies, rather than the wider group of album images and codicology, seems to be the primary factor in this attribution at a time when Persianate art history was in its infancy.

According to another hypothesis, materials acquired from Tabriz as booty in 1514 consisted of some bifolios with already pasted items, accompanied by loose specimens. Those materials were then mounted together with additional works available in the Ottoman court on new bifolios in Selim I’s scriptorium.²⁴ If so, those new bifolios must have followed a matching system of assemblage, hardly distinguishable from those that arrived from Tabriz. Meanwhile, H. 2160 would have been designed as a new album for leftover materials and primarily samples of calligraphy. Even if we accept this alternative hypothesis, a significant proportion of H. 2153 must have been assembled in Selim I’s court. Many bifolios with symmetrical layouts include Ottoman paintings and Italian engravings collected by Mehmed II that are not arbitrary insertions. This strengthens the proposition that most works acquired from Tabriz were loose specimens, a scenario that seems preferable to me among various possibilities. Both albums were therefore likely assembled during the reign of Selim I. Another factor in support of this conclusion is that none of the surviving Persian albums have similar layouts.

With a few exceptions, the bifolios of H. 2153 were detached from one another in the twentieth century for preservation purposes at the Topkapı Palace Museum. But they were carefully numbered to indicate the original order of pages in the dismantled album and separated from its latest nineteenth-century binding, and are currently stored in a large box. Based on those page numbers, I reconstructed several bifolios of H. 2153 in a previous study.²⁵ It is my hope that the continuing importance in museums today of the concepts of “masterpiece,” connoisseurship,” and “close reading” will become evident in the following sections of this essay. Some works attributed below to the Jalayirids remain unpublished, while others have been briefly mentioned in former studies without further analysis. Among the examined images, those in the pen-and-ink, or hereafter “black pen” method (qalam-i siyāhī, siyāh qalam) provide particularly fruitful comparisons with the Freer Dīvān’s unrivaled margin illustrations in the same technique.

Painters, Patrons, and Pictures in the Paired Palace Albums

Instead of referring to stylistic manners of painting, most attributions in H. 2153 and H. 2160 mention the names of individual artists. Only a few of these inscriptions contain the artists’ signatures.²⁶ This shows the emergence of an early modern practice of connoisseurship and concern for authorship, informed by the workshop lore of artists familiar with the works compiled in H. 2153 and in its smaller companion, H. 2160. The existence of such a “collective memory” could explain the otherwise uncanny parallels between attributive inscriptions in these two interrelated albums and the Safavid calligrapher Dust Muhammad’s preface to another album compiled three decades later, in 1544–45. Also kept at the Topkapı Palace Museum Library (H. 2154), that album was dedicated to the Safavid Shah Tahmasp’s brother Bahram Mirza (d. 1549), who was then the governor of Herat.²⁷

The names of early master painters mentioned in Dust Muhammad’s preface point to an ongoing tradition in Safavid Herat, where practitioners remembered their predecessors, some of whose works are mounted in the Bahram Mirza Album. Their decoratively painted captions were added by the calligrapher and court librarian Dust Muhammad, who compiled the album for that prince. Unlike H. 2153 and H. 2160, the Bahram Mirza Album (H. 2154) additionally includes works by artists from late Timurid Herat, some of whom were subsequently employed in the Safavid court. Those artists include Mavlana Valiullah, Miraq Naqqash (d. 1507; Ka- maluddin Bihzad’s teacher), Bihzad (d. ca. 1535), and Shah Muzaffar (a contemporary of Bihzad, active in the second half of the fifteenth century, who specialized in the black pen technique).

Works by contemporary Safavid and Ottoman artists are not included in albums H. 2153 and H. 2160, which emphasize established old masters. Images representing the Persianate manner and its Ottoman subcategory in both albums bear no inscriptions that identify their style, perhaps because those works were relatively familiar. Early works tend to be inscribed with more specialized attributions that name specific artists.²⁸ European and Europeanizing images mounted only in H. 2153 were left unattributed, except for one ink drawing examined below (see fig. 4b), which is correctly identified as a work in the “Frankish manner” (kār-i farang). By contrast, many sinicizing images have been labeled as works in the “Cathayan manner” (kār-i khaṭāy). Interestingly, those stylistic categories were confused with one another in two works mounted in that album. Both are black pen drawings in the “Cathayan manner,” but are labeled as “work in the Frankish manner” (kār-i farang). One of these is a tinted, black ink painting of a Mongol-Ilkhanid enthronement scene. The second example depicts a standing Chinese woman drawn in black ink.²⁹

The same confusion appears in a third image mounted in one of the Diez albums at the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, which were mostly assembled with works removed by eunuchs from albums kept at the royal residential quarters of the Topkapı Palace (H. 2152, H. 2153, and B. 411). These items were acquired in Istanbul by the learned diplomat Heinrich von Friedrich Diez around 1789–90.³⁰ The mislabeled Chinese work is a black pen drawing with bold brushstrokes, inscribed “kār-i farang.” It was cut up into several pieces and divided between two separate album pages. According to a recent reconstruction, the original drawing depicted two pairs of male figures pointing at a toad on the ground. It has been renamed as Two Chinese Chan-Buddhist Monks and Two Daoist Immortals (ca. 1400–1450).³¹ The Cathayan and Frankish manners of depiction were apparently considered commensurate with one another because of a shared emphasis on naturalism. That is why elements from both traditions could be seamlessly woven together in some hybrid works mounted in H. 2153. Commensurability may also account for the occasional confusion between those two foreign stylistic categories in attributive inscriptions.

Let us now return to album H. 2153, which contains fifteen of the world’s earliest surviving examples of Italian Renaissance engravings from Florence and Ferrara. A bifolio I have reconstructed with its recto and verso sides includes several examples of those engravings collected by Mehmed II (figs. 1a,b). The reverse is mounted with two engravings, while the front features two central bust portraits of Mehmed II in profile that gaze at each other. On the left is a colored impression of his engraved portrait, inscribed El Gran Turco (The Grand Turk); it is attributed to the Florentine Master of the Vienna Passion, ca. 1460–70.³² On the right side is a Europeanizing painted bust portrait of Mehmed II in profile, datable to ca. 1478–81. This painting is attributed to his court painter Sinan Beg, who was trained in the Italian manner by a foreign master. A third famous seated portrait of that sultan smelling a rose was also mounted in the same album, but it has been detached from that page. Modeled on Mehmed II’s bust portrait by Gentile Bellini, this painting is attributed to Sinan Beg’s student Şiblizade Ahmed of Bursa (ca. 1480–81).³³

The two centrally placed profile portraits of Mehmed II are accompanied by subordinate images and texts arranged around them in U-shaped page layouts. These include sinicizing ornamental black pen designs, and a small Persianate polychrome painting of a kneeling man declaring his love to a woman. The foliate motifs and dragon on Mehmed II’s headgear echo the sinicizing imagery of three black pen drawings pasted next to the sultan’s portraits. These juxtapositions were not accidental since such designs in the “Cathayan manner”—comprising lotus leaves inhabited by dragons, serpents, or waterfowl—were considered auspicious, often carrying imperial connotations in China. The visual resonance of black ink ornamental motifs in the tinted European engraving and its sinicizing counterparts also seems deliberate. Moreover, their calligraphic character echoes the adjoining texts in black ink.

This juxtaposition of European, Europeanizing, sinicizing, and Persianate images could promote connections, either in conjunction with accompanying calligraphies or independently. For instance, the composition that brings the two royal portraits face to face invites comparison between the European and Europeanizing manners of image making promoted in the Ottoman court. Each of the Persian poems in nastaʿlīq script pasted adjacent to these paired profile portraits suggestively allude to the ravishing beauty of the beloved’s face, no doubt referring to Mehmed II, but also obliquely to the kneeling man declaring his love to a lady.

The calligraphy pasted above El Gran Turco and signed by ʿAbd al-Rahim al-Yaʿqubi (fig. 1a) reads: “How could any eye that looked upon your beauty one day and then was separated from you, not weep bloody tears? To the extent that I live without you, I am more perplexed than one who saw your cheek and continued to live apart from you.” This quatrain has been ascribed to the renowned Naqshbandi Sufi poet of Timurid Herat, ʿAbd al-Rahman Jamiʿ (d. 1492), whose poems are widely quoted in both albums H. 2153 and H. 2160.³⁴

The nastaʿlīq couplet on the facing page, pasted sideways next to Mehmed II’s Europeanizing painted portrait, is signed by ʿAbd al-Karim al-Khvarazmi (fig. 1b). It belongs to a qasida by the renowned poet Salman Savaji (d. 1376), affiliated with the Ilkhanid and subsequently Jalayirid courts, whose poems are also quoted extensively in both albums. The couplet reads: “The feast of your cheek is the qibla of the heart for the people of purity. Every moment there is a different pleasure for us from your face.”³⁵ The two eminent calligraphers who signed these poems were brothers from Khwarazm, favored at the court of the Aqqoyunlu Sultan Yaʿqub Beg. Initially working for the Qaraqoyunlu Prince Pir Budaq (d. 1466) and the Aqqoyunlu Prince Khalil (d. 1478), they served after Yaʿqub’s death in 1490 under his successor Rustam Beg (r. 1492–97).³⁶ However, not all bifolios or folios in the album necessarily evoke such alluring associations.

The latest Europeanizing images in H. 2153 are painted bust portraits attributed to Mehmed II’s court painters. Those portraits are study exercises that respond to Italian Renaissance models, unlike paintings by Jalayirid artists in the same album that were partly inspired by late-medieval imagery from the Latin West. The Ottoman portraits are all polychrome paintings, whereas earlier Europeanizing images in that album are generally black pen drawings.³⁷ The bust format of the Ottoman portraits was unprecedented in the Islamic painting tradition. Album H. 2153 also includes a bust and a half-length polychrome-painted portrait in the “Cathayan manner,” respectively: Portrait of a Chinese Scholar, wearing a hat and painted on silk; and Portrait of a Chinese Lady, holding a white flower and painted on paper. Datable to the fifteenth century, these portraits are thought to be original works from Ming China (1368–1644).³⁸ Their relatively flat, linear style differs from those of the album’s Ottoman bust portraits, which emulate European models with three-dimensional modeling and shading. Album H. 2153 features only one slightly tinted, black ink, Chinese woodblock print on paper, datable from the late thirteenth to the mid-fourteenth century (Southern Song or Yuan periods) (fig. 1c). It too has a flat linear style and was originally printed only in black ink. This extensively restored and overpainted print has pinholes, showing its use as a stencil. Titled The Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety, it illustrates six episodes of a Confucian text on morality: Yi Lun Zhi Dao (The way of humanity).³⁹ However, H. 2153 prioritizes the fifteen Italian Renaissance engravings. Unlike European prints collected at the Ottoman court, most of the Europeanizing black ink drawings in this album were created by artists based in Iran and Iraq during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. According to Zeren Tanındı, besides Jalayirid and Ottoman works, most images mounted in H. 2153 and H. 2160 originated from fifteenth-century Qaraqoyunlu Baghdad or Shiraz, Aqqoyunlu Tabriz or Shiraz, and Timurid Herat or Samarqand.⁴⁰ The calligraphies are dominated by Qaraqoyunlu and Aqqoyunlu samples, with fewer Timurid pieces.

Jalayirid works in the black pen technique, on which I shall focus below, are sometimes tinted with colored ink wash and touches of gold. This technique seems to have emerged in early fourteenth-century mural paintings and illustrated manuscripts of the Mongol Ilkhanid dynasty (r. 1256–1335). It was further refined under the subsequent Mongol dynasty of the Jalayirids (r. 1335–1432), whose twin capitals were intermittently Tabriz and Baghdad. During the somewhat troubled reign of Sultan Ahmad Jalayir, the patron of the Freer Dīvān, his court was more often based in Baghdad (1386–93, 1394–99, and 1405–10), when he was not in exile in the Ottoman and Mamluk lands.⁴¹

The abovementioned Bahram Mirza Album (H. 2154), compiled in Safavid Iran in 1544–45, includes the polychrome painting of a room with a mural in the black pen technique, which depicts a landscape with mother and child. Known as A Poet’s Dream, this painted page was detached from Three Masnavis: a fragmentary manuscript of Khvaju Kirmani’s (d. 1352) Khamsa (Quintet) completed in 798 AH (1396) (fig. 2). The painting, datable to ca. 1390, depicts an angel of inspiration visiting the author Khvaju Kirmani in a dream, while accompanying angels fly in the sky beyond.⁴² Its illuminated heading in Persian, added by the preface-writer Dust Muhammad, reads: “This is among the works of Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy (az jumla-yi kārhā-i khvāja ʿAbd al-Ḥayy ast).”⁴³

Dust Muhammad’s often-quoted preface to the Bahram Mirza Album (H. 2154) connects the painter Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy to the artistic legacy of Master Ahmad Musa, who is said to have invented naturalistic Persianate painting during the reign of the last Mongol Ilkhanid ruler, Abu Saʿid (r. 1317–35). Ahmad Musa achieved this feat by “lifting the veil from the face of depiction.” The author of the preface also displays a keen awareness of the Cathayan and Frankish modes of figural representation in a famous passage:

[T]he custom of portraiture flourished in the lands of Cathay and the Franks until sharp-penned Mercury scrivened the rescript of rule in the name of Sultan Abusaʿid Khudaybanda. Master Ahmad Musa, who was his father’s pupil, lifted the veil from the face of depiction, and the [style of] depiction that is now current was invented by him. Among the scenes by him that lighted on the page of the world in the reign of the aforementioned emperor, an Abusaʿidnama, a Kalila u Dimna, a Miʿrajnama calligraphed by Mawlana Abdullah Sayrafi, and a Tarikh-i Chingizi in beautiful script by an unknown hand were in the library of the late emperor Sultan-Husayn Mirza.⁴⁴

This quotation implies that some of the illustrated fourteenth-century manuscripts kept at the library of Sultan-Husayn Bayqara (r. 1469–1506), the Timurid ruler of Herat, were probably seized from Tabriz, Baghdad, or another court. Fourteenth-century Kalila u Dimna paintings attributable to the painter Ahmad Musa are mounted in the Shah Tahmasp Album at the Istanbul University Library (F. 1422), while Miʿrājnāma paintings associated with that painter are included in the Bahram Mirza Album (H. 2154) featuring Dust Muhammad’s preface. According to this Safavid author, the artistic influence of the Ilkhanid-Jalayirid master painter (ustād) Ahmad Musa, who learned painting from his own father, was disseminated through master-disciple relationships to Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy.⁴⁵

Additional details about that auspicious lineage are of crucial importance for interpreting the Jalayirid contents and attributive inscriptions of albums H. 2153 and H. 2160, which lack prefaces. Therefore, it seems useful to summarize the well-known genealogy constructed in Dust Muhammad’s preface.⁴⁶ Its author explains that Master Ahmad Musa trained a slave (ghulām) of the Ilkhanid ruler Sultan Abu Saʿid, who excelled in the black pen technique. This student, named Amir Davlatyar, trained the master Ustad Shamsuddin during the reign of the Jalayirid ruler Shaykh Uvays (r. 1356–74). The painter Shamsuddin survived into the reign of that ruler’s son Sultan Ahmad Jalayir, but he preferred not to serve another monarch after his patron’s death. Instead, Ustad Shamsuddin continued to train his own student, Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy, who had studied with him during the reign of Shaykh Uvays. Residing at the household of ʿAbd al-Hayy, who took him under his protection, Shamsuddin spent the rest of his life teaching this pupil. Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy in turn instructed “Sultan Ahmad Jalayir of Baghdad” in depiction “so that the sultan himself produced a scene in Abu-Saʿidnāma in qalam siyāhī,” namely a history of the last Ilkhanid ruler in the black pen technique.⁴⁷

Filiz Çağman suggested that this scene must have been rendered in the dominant black ink technique of illustrations in the Ilkhanid author Rashid al-Din’s Jāmiʿ al-Tavārikh (Compendium of chronicles).⁴⁸ In other words, Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy was not only the leading court painter of Sultan Ahmad Jalayir, but also his tutor in the black pen technique. However, Dust Muhammad’s preface should not imply that ʿAbd al-Hayy was merely proficient in that single method. In fact, a small polychrome painting mounted in H. 2160 is signed by this painter.⁴⁹ It depicts the enthroned figure of the Shāhnāma anti-hero Zahhak with two snakes growing from his shoulders. The signature in bold letters under a table in front of Zahhak’s golden throne is fully integrated into this painting. Written on a cartouche flanked by two vases with flowers, it reads: “Kār-i [work of] Khvāja ʿAbd al-Ḥayy.” The green-curtained wall behind the throne has a mural in blue-and-white grisaille representing a landscape with blooming trees.⁵⁰

The mural rendered in a colored version of the black pen technique, which was a specialty of the artist, complements his signature. One of Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy’s talents seems to have been fitting extremely detailed designs onto small pieces of paper, not only as portable items and mementoes for the future, but also as a show of skill (see also figs. 8a,b and 8c) This master painter would subsequently be transferred with other Jalayirid artists to Samarqand, when Timur invaded Baghdad in 1393 or perhaps during a subsequent invasion in 1401.⁵¹ According to Dust Muhammad’s preface, after Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy’s death in the Timurid capital Samarqand, “all masters imitated his works.”⁵²

An earlier variant of Dust Muhammad’s mid-sixteenth-century account is provided by the biographical work of the Timurid author Amir Davlatshah Samarqandi (d. 1495), Tadhkirat al-shu‘arāʾ (Memorial of poets), completed in 1487. In this well-known account, he refers to the Jalayirid ruler Shaykh Uvays within the biography of the abovementioned poet Khvaja Salman Savaji, whose poems are featured in H. 2153. This ruler was not only one of that famed poet’s patrons, but also an expert in and a patron of music, who supported the celebrated musician ʿAbd al-Qadir Maraghi (d. 1435). When Shaykh Uvays died, his son Sultan Ahmad enthusiastically supported Maraghi for two decades in Baghdad, where he participated in intimate royal majlises and audiences. During Sultan Ahmad’s exile in Mamluk Egypt, after Timur’s invasion of Baghdad, this renowned musician was transported to Samarqand, like the master painter Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy.⁵³

According to the biographer Davlatshah Samarqandi, the Jalayirid ruler Shaykh Uvays was handsome, refined, educated in various branches of knowledge, and an artist whose artworks in “qalam-i vāsıṭī” (lit., reed pen and ink, or style of Wasit in Iraq) were admired by painters. This term likely refers to the “black pen” (qalam-i siyāhī) technique, as suggested by Filiz Çaḡman. The biographer adds that Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy, “the most outstanding exponent of the art in his day[,] was his [Shaykh Uvays’s] protégé and pupil.”⁵⁴ In other words, the ruler Uvays was both a skilled artist and the teacher of Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy, probably in black pen drawing. The same author equally praises Shaykh Uvays’s son Sultan Ahmad Jalayir. Not only was the musician ʿAbd al-Qadir Maraghi in his retinue, but “it is said [that he] was [also] his pupil.” Davlatshah lists the following skills possessed by Sultan Ahmad Jalayir, including painting and calligraphy: “He was a talented ruler, a patron of the arts, and of a poetic disposition. He composed good poetry in Persian and Arabic and was proficient in many crafts, such as painting, illumination, bow-making, arrow making, inlay etc. and wrote the six pens.”⁵⁵

Dust Muhammad’s album preface, which stresses the painter Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy’s rise to prominence under his own royal pupil, Sultan Ahmad Jalayir, reveals the continuity of master-disciple relationships from the late Ilkhanid through the Jalayirid periods. This, in turn, contributed to the connection between the Ilkhanid and Jalayirid painting traditions. Written in Kashmir from 1541 to 1546, around the time of Dust Muhammad’s preface, the Tārikh-i Rashīdī by Mirza Muhammad-Haydar Dughlat (d. 1551) affirms the fame of the painter Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy. The masters of depiction (al-muṣawwirān) regarded him as a patron saint:

Long ago in the time of the Hulaguid [Mongol] khans who were emperors of Iraq, there was Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy. The practitioners of this art believed he was a saint (walī). In the end he repented [of painting], and wherever he found his works he washed them off and burnt them. For this reason, his works are very rare. In purity of brush (ṣafā’-i qalam), fineness and solidity, indeed in all characteristics of painting, he has no peer. After Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy, there were Shah Muzaffar and Bihzad. After them until our own day there has appeared no one.⁵⁶

Since the repentant Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy destroyed his works, probably after his dispiriting abduction to Samarqand, only very few examples remained. Two black pen drawings mounted in one of the Diez albums in Berlin bear signatures by Muhammad b. Mahmudshah al-Khayyam, which state that he copied each from a work of Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy: Two Immortals in Combat and Swimming Duck. This confirms that ʿAbd al-Hayy was a master of black pen drawing and that some Timurid artists did imitate his works after he died in Samarqand. It has been suggested that those models were in Timurid Herat until the 1450s, after which they moved to Tabriz, then ruled by the Qaraqoyunlu Turkmen dynasty (1410–67).⁵⁷

Apparently, the artist al-Khayyam, who was affiliated with the court of the Timurid prince Baysunghur Mirza (d. 1433) in Herat, had access to ʿAbd al-Hayy’s drawings in the black pen technique.⁵⁸ Interestingly, the two models preserved in H. 2153 lack attributive inscriptions mentioning ʿAbd al-Hayy. Some of al-Khayyam’s works are mounted in the Timurid Workshop Album (H. 2152), also kept at the Topkapı Palace Museum Library. Like H. 2160, it bears an impression of Selim I’s almond-shaped sovereignty seal (on fol. 3r). Mostly featuring Timurid images and calligraphies (ca. 1400–1450), that album, which was assembled in Herat, has been dated by David Roxburgh to around the time of the death of the Timurid ruler Shahrukh (r. 1405–47). Works attributable to the Jalayirids and their Turkmen successors are largely preserved in the paired albums H. 2153 and H. 2160, accompanied by Timurid and relatively few Ottoman pieces.⁵⁹

Shahrukh’s son Baysunghur Mirza, who knew Persian and Arabic besides his mother tongue of Eastern Turkish, recruited some members of his scriptorium in Herat from Tabriz, which he captured following the death of its Qaraqoyunlu Turkmen ruler Qara Yusuf in 1420. Shahrukh appointed Baysunghur governor-general (wālī) of Tabriz in 1421, but he soon returned to Herat, preferring to reside with his mother and close to his father. When Shahrukh reconquered Tabriz in 1436, he appointed the Qaraqoyunlu Prince Jahanshah (r. 1438–67) to govern it as his vassal.

Baysunghur was the patron of an illustrated Shāhnāma of Firdausi completed in 833 AH (1429–30). According to Dust Muhammad’s preface, he even commissioned full replicas of illustrated Jalayirid manuscripts for his library in Herat, including a Kalila u Dimna, and an anthology (jung) made for “Sultan Ahmad Jalayir of Baghdad.”⁶⁰ Zeki Velidi Togan suggested that Ilkhanid and Jalayirid works in the Topkapı albums H. 2152 (then attributed to Baysunghur), as well as those in H. 2153 and H. 2160 (ascribed by him to Yaʿqub Aqqoyunlu) were partly derived from the jung of Sultan Ahmad Jalayir, mentioned by Dust Muhammad. That is because Togan misinterpreted this term (jung/cung) as an album, rather than an illustrated anthology.⁶¹

Artists of the Qaraqoyunlu and Aqqoyunlu Turkmen courts in Tabriz also had access to rare works by the Jalayirid master painter Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy. Among them were the abovementioned Aqqoyunlu painters Shaykhi and Darvish Muhammad, who cosigned a painting in H. 2153.⁶² Zeren Tanındı has shown that these two artists have the most attributions in that album. Shaykhi, who was affiliated with the Aqqoyunlu ruler Sultan Yaʿqub, sometimes signed his work as “ʿamal-i Shaykhī al-Yaʿqūbī.”⁶³ According to Çaḡman’s unpublished dissertation, Shaykhi and Darvish Muhammad jointly illustrated a Khamsa of Nizami (H. 762), dated 1475–81, confirmation that both artists were connected to the Aqqoyunlu Turkmen court.⁶⁴

Robinson hypothesized that Darvish Muhammad may have been the same artist to whom many works are attributed in H. 2153 and H. 2160 as “ʿamal-i / kār-i Ustād Muḥammad Siyāh Qalam” (Work of Master Muhammad Black Pen). If so, at least a subgroup of those idiosyncratic works in diverse subjects, styles, and hands could have been created by him in Aqqoyunlu Tabriz (1468–1501), but this is highly conjectural. Those attributive inscriptions have also been interpreted as epithets of an artist working in the black pen technique, possibly the Aqqoyunlu Darvish Muhammad or even several artists.⁶⁵ Alternatively, Ustad Muhammad Siyah Qalam could be the nickname of an artist who, in my opinion, may have been active earlier in Qaraqoyunlu Tabriz (1410–67).⁶⁶ Inscriptions that drop the name Muhammad may generically refer to masters working in that technique.

The controversial Muhammad Siyah Qalam corpus was usefully categorized by Çağman as a subgroup of works in the black pen technique, generally consisting of independent images with blank backgrounds and unrelated to narrative manuscripts.⁶⁷ The two artists Shaykhi and Darvish Muhammad, who were active in Aqqoyunlu Tabriz, are not mentioned in Dust Muhammad’s album preface, which was written in Safavid Herat (1544–45). Nor does he refer to Muhammad al-Khayyam, who was once based in Herat. This suggests that he either did not know those artists or considered their works irrelevant for the genealogical narrative of his preface.

Album H. 2153 contains rare works attributed by inscriptions to the Ilkhanid-Jalayirid master Ahmad Musa, as well as his disciple Amir [Mir] Davlatyar, followed by Ustad Shamsuddin and Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy. Only a few of their works are mounted in the smaller album H. 2160.⁶⁸ Conspicuously missing from attributive inscriptions in both albums is the last Jalayirid artist briefly included in Dust Muhammad’s list: “Another of Shamsuddin’s students was Master Junayd of Baghdad.”⁶⁹ It is possible that Junayd’s works were not available in Tabriz during Selim I’s invasion in 1514. His signature was identified long ago in a Jalayirid polychrome painting in Three Masnavis, from Khvaju Kirmani’s Khamsa, completed in 1396. It appears on an upper window in the black pen technique and reveals his high status as a court painter: “Work of Junayd of Baghdad, the royal painter” (ʿamal-i Junayd-i Baghdādī, naqqāsh-i sulṭānī).⁷⁰

If Jalayirid artists were carried away from Baghdad to Samarqand by Timur in 1393, rather than in 1401, Junayd may have been left behind and continued to work under Sultan Ahmad Jalayir’s patronage.⁷¹ However, Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy is generally proposed as the more likely artist who illustrated the Freer Dīvān, assuming that he was abducted to Samarqand later in 1401.⁷² As we have seen, A Poet’s Dream, which was detached from Khvaju Kirmani’s Three Masnavis and mounted in the Bahram Mirza Album (H. 2154), is attributed to Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy in the heading added by Dust Muhammad (1544–45) (fig. 2). Based on that painting, Massumeh Farhad has ascribed at least some black pen margin drawings of the Freer Dīvān to Sultan Ahmad’s teacher Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy. She suggests that more than one artist may have been involved in illustrating this manuscript.⁷³

As we have seen, A Poet’s Dream depicts the author Khvaju Kirmani’s dream inspiration by an angel, accompanied by a host of flying angels. A tinted black pen version of flying angels illustrates one of the margins in the Freer Dīvān (see figs. 2, 6). I suggest that the Dīvān’s auspicious angels not only inspire artistic creativity, but also pour blessings upon its author Sultan Ahmad Jalayir, as if responding to a written litany repeated in each text break within a cartouche: “May God the Most High perpetuate his Caliphate and Sultanate!”

Selected Works from the Interrelated Albums H. 2153 and H. 2160

Many coveted Jalayirid works seem to have reached the Ottoman court in 1514 after circulating in the palaces of the Timurids, Turkmens, and early Safavids. The damaged pre-Ottoman rulings that frame several images mounted in H. 2153 and H. 2160 suggest that they were removed from no-longer-surviving albums. A page in H. 2153 even includes the black pen drawing Head of a Horse, framed by partially preserved rulings and attributed by an inscription to Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy’s royal pupil, Sultan Ahmad Jalayir (see fig. 29a). Seemingly written by the Jalayirid ruler himself, this boastful signature reads: “My world-conquering horse has seized Time and Space (gūn va makān)! Work of Emperor Aḥmad (kār-i Aḥmad Pādshāh), the ready, the enflamed!”⁷⁴

Unlike the Bahram Mirza Album (H. 2154), with its evolutionary art historical preface, the primary function of the two interrelated albums H. 2153 and 2160 seems to have been rapidly rescuing unique works from dispersal and disorder into “collectedness,” to use an expression coined by Dust Muhammad. These paired albums were not assembled as model books for the Ottoman court workshops. As such, they differ from the Timurid Workshop Album (H. 2152) in the same collection, which covers a shorter timespan (ca. 1400–1450) and was assembled for that purpose prior to 1450. Primarily intended for the gaze of the royal household members, the paired albums could be consulted by Ottoman painters and calligraphers only with special permission. A note in H. 2160 states that this “book” (kitāb) was moved from the sultan’s privy chamber at the residential third court of the Topkapı Palace to the royal treasury of that court in March 1576.⁷⁵ The note confirms that the album was a bound volume or book at that time, kept at the treasury library if not in use by the sultan or his male and female intimates. This contradicts the hypothesis that H. 2160 was created in a book format with margins during the nineteenth century, which is also refuted by the already mentioned impressions of Selim I’s sovereignty seal on its first and last pages.⁷⁶

Album H. 2153, together with, and to a lesser degree, H. 2160, constitutes a unique archive of rare works by Jalayirid “early masters,” updated with Timurid, Turkmen, and few Ottoman samples. It displays images and calligraphy specimens over an extensive timespan, but with no chronological order. Hence, attributive inscriptions and signatures in H. 2153 correspond closely to the evolutionary art historical preface of Dust Muhammad, more so than the chronologically limited collection of the Bahram Mirza Album (H. 2154; 1544–45), which contains that preface.

In fact, H. 2153 stands out as a major source for tracing the evolution of the Persianate black pen technique, and of Jalayirid artworks that contributed to the development of Timurid and Turkmen painting. This album is therefore highly relevant for contextualizing the unique illustrations of the Freer Dīvān. The black pen technique used in Head of a Horse, apparently signed by Sultan Ahmad Jalayir, has been interpreted in scholarship as a response to Chinese ink paintings and woodblock prints. That method was introduced to the Persianate pictorial tradition by two successive Mongol dynasties, the Ilkhanids and the Jalayirids. However, it also recalls the grisaille method that emerged in early fourteenth-century frescoes and manuscript paintings in the Latin West, as well as the Levant. The similarity can partly be attributed to the circulation of artists and their works.

Black pen drawings in H. 2153 and in the Freer Dīvān display a familiarity with both Chinese and European models.⁷⁷ It is therefore not surprising that several images in this album are identified as works in the “Frankish manner” (kār-i farang) and “Cathayan manner” (kār-i khaṭāy).⁷⁸ References to these foreign stylistic manners also appeared in Timurid texts, such as that of the renowned poet and statesman of Timurid Herat, ʿAli Shir Navaʾi’s Mahbūb al-kulūb 906 AH (1500–1501) in Chaghatay Turkish. In it, he declares that the painter (muṣavvir) must create naturalistic representations, a skill epitomized by ʿAbd al-Hayy, whom he compares in rank to Mani, the legendary Chinese manuscript illuminator (Mānī muzehhib) who was the supreme master of “Cathayan” (H˘ıṭāyī) and “Frankish” (Firengī) designs. Interestingly, Autumn Landscape, a spectacular polychrome painting on paper in the “Cathayan” manner in H. 2153, has been acclaimed by an attributive inscription as the “Work of Mani” (kār-i Mānī).⁷⁹

This brightly colored sinicizing landscape may be a Jalayirid work datable to the mid-fourteenth century (figs. 3a,b). The much-damaged painting, with fold marks and missing areas, has been carefully restored. A formerly unnoted miniscule fragment, with an identical thick golden frame bordered by black lines, is preserved on another page of the album.⁸⁰ It probably belonged to the lower edge of Autumn Landscape, judging by the position of that fragment’s frame and the stream running through its trees, which apparently originated from the waterfall at the hilltop of the large painting.

Let us now turn to the only image in H. 2153 correctly labeled as a “work in the Frankish manner” (fig. 4b).⁸¹ This slightly tinted black pen drawing, titled Eight Figures in European Attire, is rendered on a horizontal band of aged brownish paper. Inspired by Chinese scrolls, this format was common in the court workshops of the Ilkhanids and Jalayirids. The Europeanizing drawing is mounted on a bifolio, which I have reconstructed (figs. 4a,b). Each of the pages facing one another is dominated by a large central polychrome painting from an incomplete Jalayirid Shāhnāma (ca. 1370–74) commonly associated with Shaykh Uvays, who was the most accomplished ruler of that dynasty.⁸²

The black pen drawing portrays eight standing personages with Frankish physiognomy, hairstyle, and attire. Only the two female figures are slightly tinted by colored wash in gray, blue, and pink, while the six male figures have only been modeled in gray wash. The awkward rendering of the necks and shoulders of the figures suggests that the drawing is not the authentic work of a “Frank,” but rather a “work in the Frankish manner.” This figure study can be attributed to a Persianate painter who probably had access to “Frankish” visual sources. The late-medieval costumes and archaic crusader-type armaments suggest a fourteenth-century date, prior to the emergence of fitted and shorter-length male attire. Based on its style, this drawing has plausibly been attributed by Bernard O’Kane to the Jalayirid courts in Tabriz or Baghdad around the third quarter of the fourteenth century. He regards the crosshatching on some robes as a diagnostic feature of the Jalayirid style.⁸³

My reconstruction of the bifolio featuring Eight Figures in European Attire shows that it has U-shaped symmetrical layouts on both facing pages, each organized around a central painting from the Jalayirid Shāhnāma. The contiguous ink drawing in the “Frankish manner” and the polychrome Shāhnāma painting seem to be coeval. They are framed by almost identical, black ink rulings painted in gold and lapis lazuli, created before both works were mounted on the same page. This symmetrical bifolio is an example of the visual logic I have detected in many facing pages of album H. 2153, where monumental paintings from the Jalayirid Shāhnāma often occupy center stage. Serpil Bağcı has confirmed that more than half of its approximately thirty paintings are symmetrically mounted on either side of such bifolios.⁸⁴

Another black pen drawing in H. 2153, Celestial Vision, has been attributed to Jalayirid Tabriz or Baghdad in the last quarter of the fourteenth century (fig. 5).⁸⁵ This mysterious work smoothly blends Europeanizing and sinicizing imagery. It is a finished drawing in black ink on brownish paper with gray and blue wash, framed by rulings in gold and lapis lazuli. On the right side of the sinicizing landscape, a bent tree curving downward frames a horned dragon’s five-clawed paw and terrifying visage. The dragon ascends a rocky cliff from a deep gorge, where a bird stands next to bamboo plants. The dragon is reaching toward a celestial sphere enveloped by fiery swirls among Chinese cloud bands. This object seems to be a flaming or luminous pearl of perfection, which was a Chinese metaphor for spiritual enlightenment.

The upper left side of the drawing has a complementary Christian image of enlightenment depicting the apparition of a six-winged archangel to two stupefied men atop a mountain. It was probably inspired by one of the supernatural encounter scenes on a mountaintop, familiar to Latin Christian missionaries and merchants along the Silk Road. A non-circulating early example of this iconography is Taddeo Gaddi’s Annunciation to Two Shepherds fresco (1328–30) at the Baroncelli Chapel in Florence. The Jalayirid artist has translated his Frankish model into the Cathayan mode of landscape painting, thereby turning this black pen drawing into a transcultural site of encounter between Europe and China.

The sinicizing landscape with cloud bands, and the angel’s gray gradient wings featuring darker tips, find their counterparts in the Freer Dīvān’s black pen drawings, particularly Angels Amidst Clouds and Camp Scene (see figs. 6, 10).⁸⁶ However, the lyrical landscapes of the Dīvān differ from the rugged and rather eerie terrains of Celestial Vision and of the Jalayirid Shāhnāma paintings. As Farhad has observed, the Dīvān’s eight late fourteenth-century illustrations occupy the margins “as if the poems are placed over them.”⁸⁷ In her analysis of the tinted black pen drawing with angels, she notes that “this most exuberant and colorful of all the Dīvān’s margin compositions” reveals the availability of Western pictorial sources to Jalayirid artists. Farhad also points out that Western imagery is “less apparent in painted manuscript illustrations of the period,”⁸⁸ and makes the following incisive observation about the angels:

One of the most unusual features of the Angels Amidst Clouds is the serrated opening at the top of the folio, which suggests a space beyond. Three angels peer through the crack as the stream of gold clouds spills on to the margin below. This pictorial device, which is indebted to Christian religious iconography, has been skillfully appropriated in the Dīvān to differentiate between a terrestrial and celestial sphere.⁸⁹

This detail finds a hitherto overlooked, remarkable parallel in album H. 2153 (fig. 7).⁹⁰ It is a miniscule painted fragment (94 by 76 mm), framed with partly preserved gold and lapis lazuli rulings, lined in black ink. By magnifying this puzzling fragment, I was astonished to notice that it depicts in black ink the faces and bare shoulders of two angels wearing partly visible pink robes. Like their counterparts in the Freer Dīvān, these angels are peering through the “crack” between the celestial and terrestrial sphere, but brown patches of the landscape below are also visible here and there. This miniscule semi-black-pen painting, Two Angels Peering Through Clouds, was apparently saved in the album as a precious memento or model for future artists. Datable to the late fourteenth century, it may have been the work of a famous Jalayirid master, perhaps Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy, to whom the angels in the Freer Dīvān are attributed by Klimburg-Salter.

In album H. 2153, three other tiny black pen drawings not framed by rulings are ascribed in identical taʿlīq script to that artist: “Ṭarḥ-i [drawing of] Khvāja ʿAbd al-Ḥayy” and “ʿAmal-i [work of] Khvāja ʿAbd al-Ḥayy” (figs. 8a,b, 8c). These late fourteenth-century drawings in black ink have been analyzed by Zeren Tanındı.⁹¹ Two of them are mounted together on the margin of an album page, one above the other. The first drawing is an encampment scene with tents and standing persons at the foot of spongelike mountains, behind which two large figures stare at the encampment. A tall tree along the left margin resembles those depicted in the Dīvān. The second drawing features two horsemen wearing armor, one of whom slashes off the head of his enemy with a sword. The third is a sketch on the margin of a different page, with a pair of partridges standing next to almond-shaped flat rocks and steep mountains.

Another Europeanizing black pen drawing in H. 2153, which I have labeled Triumphal Procession in a former study and ascribed to the Jalayirid courts in Baghdad or Tabriz, also exhibits striking parallels with the Freer Dīvān (fig. 9).⁹² This representation of a parade is rendered in black ink and gray wash against a blank background. It is the fragment of a work in horizontal format, on aged dark-beige paper with tattered edges. In the foreground, we see horses strapped by the neck to parallel rods, which must have been attached to a ceremonial cart on wheels in the missing right side of the drawing. The central horse rider is a young man with Frankish hairstyle, crowned by a laurel wreath in the manner of ancient Roman triumphs.

The Frankish male and female riders in the background of Triumphal Procession wear late- medieval attire, resembling those worn by personages in the Camp Scene of the Dīvān (figs. 9, 10). The two aristocratic female riders have peaked headdresses, whose tie strings are fastened by a tassel hanging over a wimple that covers the neck and shoulders, while their long robes have hanging sleeves. The men with Frankish hairstyles wear shawls lined with ermine fur. In the Camp Scene, a woman wears a similar wimple, while the mother holding a baby in the foreground is dressed in an ermine-lined long robe with hanging sleeves. Such parallels demonstrate the cosmopolitan flavor of Jalayirid fashions. Both black pen drawings feature elegant personages with similar big, round eyeballs, tiny puckered lips, and pointed noses. Their naturalistic gestures and the rendering of horses are similar as well. Furthermore, the crosshatched straps of a tent in Camp Scene match the saddle straps of the horse in Triumphal Procession. As mentioned, crosshatching has been identified as a diagnostic feature of the Jalayirid style.

Each of the eight black pen illustrations in the Dīvān depicts open-air scenes that merge Frankish and Cathayan elements with a distinctive Persianate sensibility. Some of these late-Jalayirid black pen compositions feature washes in gray, with traces of blue or brown, and occasionally gold.⁹³ Farhad judges these margin drawings as examples of an unparalleled Jalayirid taste for lyrical naturalism and refinement “before Timurids ushered in greater codification of the pictorial arts.” Instead of the 1400s, she reasonably prefers, like Adel Adamova, a date in the 1390s “when Sultan Ahmad was not on the run and was surrounded by some of his favorite painters and calligraphers.”⁹⁴ The matching elegance of the Dīvān’s Persian nastaʿliq script by Mir ʿAli b. Hasan Tabrizi has been expertly analyzed by Simon Rettig.⁹⁵

Another page in H. 2153 with two contiguous images also displays parallels with the Freer Dīvān (figs. 11a,b). The large polychrome painting is pasted next to a medium-size black pen drawing. The colored landscape has the following attributive inscription in the upper left corner: “Kār-i [work of] Aḥmad Mūsā).” As we have seen, Dust Muhammad’s preface identified this mid-fourteenth-century artist as the inventor of naturalistic Persianate painting, whose legacy culminated in Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy during Sultan Ahmad Jalayir’s reign. The adjacent, smaller black pen drawing on that page depicts a garden outing of courtly individuals, for which I propose a late fourteenth-century Jalayirid provenance. Both images were framed as finished works prior to being mounted on this album page. Their partially cropped black-lined rulings are painted in gold and lapis lazuli. Men and women depicted in the black pen drawing resemble those in Triumphal Procession, mounted in the same album (fig. 9). The individuals and composition of this garden outing come even closer to the Freer Dīvān’s margin illustration Landscape with Two Couples (fig. 12), to which we shall return below.⁹⁶

This black pen drawing was probably pasted next to Ahmad Musa’s colored landscape painting because they were considered somewhat related. After all, that master painter (ustād), who flourished during the late Ilkhanate, probably continued to work under their Jalayirid successors until ca. 1360 or later, and his artistic legacy encompassed the black pen technique.⁹⁷ In album H. 2153, eight narrative paintings from the Shāhnāma of Shaykh Uvays, plus two independent landscape paintings including this one, are attributed by inscriptions to Ahmad Musa. One of those polychrome Shāhnāma paintings, which depicts an enthroned ruler’s reception ceremony in a palace, shows along its left margin the approach of an elephant painted in the black pen technique. Its white tusk, signed “Ahmad Musa,” implies his skill in that technique as well.⁹⁸

The large polychrome landscape attributed to him is painted in tones of green, beige, and brown (fig. 11a). Its panoramic expanse, which recalls that of several landscape paintings of H. 2153 in the “Cathayan manner,” was a novelty in Persianate painting (see figs. 3a, 30).⁹⁹ On the right side of Ahmad Musa’s landscape, mountain ranges are bordered by dark green shrubs. Beyond them extends a light green valley, represented from an elevated vantage point. A distant monument with a bulbous dome at the center of cubical structures is fronted by fields and several paths lined by bright green trees. Along one of those paths, mules carry dark brown packs of firewood with a herdsman walking behind them. Similarly, in the Camp Scene of the Freer Dīvān, a man and woman carry firewood to two seated cooks (fig. 10). In the landscape painting attributed to Ahmad Musa, another path emerges in the foreground from a monumental red brick building with a tall portal. It may be a caravanserai whose partly visible lateral facade has two round arches that probably functioned as shops. Departing along that path is a caravan of camels, which suggests the presence of an urban settlement beyond this rural landscape.

The upper edge of this painting lacks rulings because it has been trimmed to fit the album page. The rulings on both sides of the adjacent black pen drawing of a garden outing are also missing because they too were trimmed. Both this work and a similar black pen illustration in the Freer Dīvān portray two pairs of couples, in outdoor settings (figs. 11b, 12). The drawing in H. 2153 depicts a garden outing with two seated couples and their standing companions.¹⁰⁰ In the Dīvān drawing, one of the couples is seated, while the other couple stands next to a tree along the left margin, with birds flying above. Since this ink drawing is titled Landscape with Two Couples, it may be appropriate to refer to its counterpart in H. 2153 as Landscape with Two Couples and Standing Companions.

Individuals represented in the album drawing wear typically Jalayirid long robes with hanging sleeves and ermine fur linings (fig. 11b). The coiffures of the elite women seated in the foreground are also similar, arranged in a loop on both sides of the forehead under a distinctive headscarf, which is decorated with a central brooch or aigrette. The men in that drawing have their hair tied in two Mongol-style buns behind their ears, unlike the Islamized male companions wearing turbans in the Dīvān (fig. 12). The round table and tray seen in these works, each with two wine bottles, constitute another parallel. Moreover, each image features an empty bed at the center where the couples could rest or sleep: a spacious rectangular carpet with several cushions in the Dīvān and, in the album, a raised marble platform with a single long cushion, surrounded by a sinicizing balustrade. The latter finds its counterpart in the Dīvān’s ink drawing of a landscape titled Gathering of Scholars.¹⁰¹

The subject of a preparatory black ink drawing in H. 2153 that features an outing in a landscape can be identified as Shirin Looking at the Portrait of Khusrav, from Nizami’s (d. 1209) romance Khusrav u Shīrīn (fig. 13).¹⁰² This time, however, the group comprises mostly women. Datable to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, it resembles the Freer Dīvān illustrations in terms of its page layout. The album drawing surrounds the frame of the text block and extends beyond a second frame up to the edges of that page. The double frames of this drawing, marked by parallel lines, echo those of illustrated pages in the Freer Dīvān. In the latter, black pen illustrations similarly extend beyond the linings of two parallel frames to “conquer” the margins.

In Shirin Looking at the Portrait of Khusrav, the loose robes with hanging sleeves worn by the women, as well as their hairstyles, recall those of the Dīvān, though their scarves lack jeweled brooches. The Armenian princess Shirin is sitting in a forest on a carpet and leaning against a pillow, resembling those on the central carpet of Landscape with Two Couples in the Dīvān (figs. 12, 13). Both images include a table with two wine bottles. The ladies-in-waiting seated next to the table in the album drawing are playing musical instruments. At the upper right side, two turbaned male attendants or onlookers are standing next to a tree. Meanwhile, the Persian king Khusrav’s painter friend Shapur is spying Shirin across the branches of that tree, from behind a hill.

Such courtly outdoor gatherings became a favored subject of illustrated Jalayirid manuscripts. Another example is the polychrome painting Humay and Humayun Feasting in a Garden and Listening to Musicians, which illustrates an episode from the Khamsa of Khvaju Kirmani (Baghdad, ca. 1396).¹⁰³ Unlike the crowned royal couple seated on a golden throne in that brightly colored painting, the black pen margin illustrations of the Freer Dīvān do not feature any royal personage wearing a crown or seated on a lavish throne. Moreover, none of the Dīvān paintings includes indoor scenes, which abound in the Khamsa manuscript. Except for paintings intended for the Jalayirid Shāhnāma commissioned by Sultan Ahmad Jalayir’s father, only one indoor scene in album H. 2153 is attributable to that dynasty. This fascinating medium-size, unfinished black pen drawing, datable to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, has gold and dark silver highlights. Framed by gold and lapis lazuli rulings, it depicts the interior of a domed bathhouse with a pool, which includes several women as well as a mother and child (fig. 14).¹⁰⁴

The preference for outdoor scenes in the Freer Dīvān may partly be attributed to the peripatetic lifestyle of Sultan Ahmad Jalayir’s intimate court, which was, as mentioned earlier, often in exile, away from city palaces. Also missing from that manuscript are depictions of grandiose official audience scenes with an enthroned ruler, and representations of the royal hunter or war. These omissions are consistent with the theme of “reluctant sovereignty” diagnosed by Ali Ferdowsi in the sultan’s poetry, which “renounces worldly sovereignty” with its hard work of “conquest, bloodshed and the mundane task of running the affairs of a harsh world.” Moreover, the Shāhnāma and its author “are never mentioned, nor are the books’ great heroes and kings.”¹⁰⁵

Just as the monumental Jalayirid Shāhnāma attributed to his father, Shaykh Uvays, remained unfinished, no new grand version of that epic poem on the glorious exploits of Iranian kings and heroes was commissioned by Sultan Ahmad Jalayir. During his reign, other literary texts were illustrated with relatively few but exquisitely refined polychrome paintings. Examples of illustrated poetry from this period include the abovementioned Three Masnavis of Khvaju Kirmani’s Khamsa (1396; British Library) and the Khamsa of Nizami (Tabriz, ca. 1400; Freer Gallery of Art). Depictions of women became more prominent, not only because of subjects covered in those Khamsas, but also thanks to the unusually high status accorded to literate ladies of royal Mongol descent in the Jalayirid dynasty. It was through intermarriage that the Mongol Jalayirids claimed to be legitimate inheritors of Ilkhanid sovereignty.¹⁰⁶

Future art historical studies might attempt to further explore, together with literary historians, the resonances between illustrations of the Dīvān and Sultan Ahmad Jalayir’s accompanying lyrical poems. As explained by Farhad, the Dīvān’s poetry is replete with themes of “love, yearning, and companionship” that do not readily “lend themselves to pictorial representation.”¹⁰⁷ Sufi themes in Sultan Ahmad’s poetry have also been seen as dominated by the concept of metaphorical love, besides the renunciation of worldly sovereignty. Literary studies on the Dīvān’s poetry have highlighted the sultan’s sensitivity to the beauties of nature, the seasons, flowers, birds, and nightingales, often compared with the attractiveness of the beloved as a source of happiness.¹⁰⁸ I would add that this sensitivity is amply captured in the Dīvān’s black pen illustrations dominated by expressive landscapes. By contrast, Sultan Ahmad’s love of entertainment, music, feasting, and drinking wine in intimate royal majlises is visually implicit in the polychrome paintings of the Khamsas.

Connoisseurship, Aesthetic Appraisals, and Landscape Painting

Attributions to artists in album H. 2153 are sometimes accompanied by aesthetic appraisals in Persian, particularly in works ascribed by inscriptions to Ahmad Musa, which often include unprecedented expansive landscapes. The emphasis on connoisseurship may have emerged in the fifteenth century when the earliest known albums were compiled, including two now-lost, late-Timurid examples, only the prefaces of which have survived. One of these was written in 1492 by the Timurid stylist of Herat, Marvarid, for an album owned by Mir ‘Ali Shir Nava’i (d. 1501), while the other preface was composed by the historian Khvandamir (d. ca. 1535) for an album of painting and calligraphy assembled by the “perfect painter” Bihzad, “unique in his age.” Despite the brevity of both prefaces in comparison to that of Dust Muhammad, the lost contents of these late-Timurid albums may have reflected and contributed to a rising interest in connoisseurship and authorship.¹⁰⁹

The unprecedented profusion of written attributions and aesthetic assessments in H. 2153 and H. 2060 accords well with an in-between date of around 1514. Roxburgh has noted an absence of surviving albums from about 1450 until 1544; however, these two albums fill that gap. The partly damaged pre-Ottoman rulings that frame many images mounted in both albums suggest that some of those items originated from no-longer-surviving albums. Attributive inscriptions in album H. 2153 that mention Ahmad Musa appear especially on polychrome paintings detached from the aforementioned Jalayirid Shāhnāma (ca. 1370–74) commissioned by Shaykh Uvays. One of those paintings, Minūchihr Kills Salm, is inscribed in nastaʿlīq script with the following aesthetic appraisal: “Work of Ahmad Musa, it is made exceedingly well” (kār-i Aḥmad Mūsā ba-ghāyat khūb sākhta ast).¹¹⁰

A similar polychrome album painting from that Shāhnāma, which depicts the second stage of Isfandiyar’s Haft Khvān (Seven Labors), when he kills two lions, is inscribed diagonally at the midpoint of the upper edge as “Aḥmad Mūsā” (fig. 15).¹¹¹ It has a bent brown tree extending beyond the picture frame into the right margin, across a tarnished dark silver river. A similar brown tree bending in the other direction, toward the left, is depicted above a curved mound in the foreground. Next to it, in the middle of the beige and light brown landscape, another bent tree with two intertwined trunks is conspicuously rendered in the black pen technique. Growing from Taihu stones, it is accompanied by bushes, and to its left side by horizontal, almond-shaped rocks that sprout reeds with long, narrow leaves. As noted above, a miniscule black pen sketch ascribed to Khvaja ʾAbd al-Hayy by an inscription depicts these distinctive, almond-shaped flat rocks (fig. 8c). However, it is not easy to distinguish the styles of individual Jalayirid artists from one another, given their interlinked artistic genealogy descending from Ahmad Musa, some of whose Shāhnāma paintings also have similar rocks.

Another Jalayirid painting in H. 2153 from the same Shāhnāma is inscribed: “Hail to Ahmad Musa! the painting by our pole” (khūshā Aḥmad Mūsā, ṣūrat-i ḳuṭb-i māst). Serpil Bağcı has identified its subject as Qāran Kills Bārmān (fig. 16).¹¹² The black ink inscription scribbled on a light gray horse was probably added by a Persianate artist who had access to that painting long before it was mounted in H. 2153. He and his colleagues, who revered the master painter Ahmad Musa as their “pole” (leader or guide), must have regarded this work as an ultimate standard of excellence. It is unclear whether those artists were Ahmad Musa’s own fourteenth-century disciples, or later painters at the Timurid court who copied the Jalayirid Shāhnāma (ca. 1426–30) for Baysunghur Mirza.¹¹³ As mentioned, painters likewise exalted Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy as a “saint” (walī).

Bağcı suggests that the Timurid prince Baysunghur, who fought the Turkmen army, probably brought the unfinished Jalayirid Shāhnāma to Herat with other manuscripts commissioned by Sultan Ahmad Jalayir, as a model for his own Shāhnāma, which was completed in 1430. She speculates that folios from that Shāhnāma, currently mounted in H. 2153, were likely brought back to Tabriz during Turkmen victories over the Timurids, either in 1458, when the Qaraqoyunlu ruler Jahanshah seized Herat, or later, in 1469, when the Aqqoyunlu Uzun Hasan vanquished his Timurid rival Abu Saʾid. A similar hypothesis was proposed by Basil Gray.¹¹⁴ In any case, the mobility of paintings and painters was one of the factors behind the circulation of artistic idioms.

The painting Qāran Kills Bārmān depicts a formidable nighttime battle with dramatic bold colors and a dynamic composition (fig. 16). In the lower left corner, the heads of fallen soldiers are lined up among no-longer-useful weapons. At the midpoint of the foreground, one of the faces noticeably stares directly at the viewer, establishing eye contact for an emotional response. To the right of this face, rugged rocks scattered on the ground are painted in tones of brown, gray, and black. A short, contorted tree and bladelike bushes drawn in the black pen technique function here as the grand master Ahmad Musa’s signature. The unpainted foregrounds of several other illustrations from that Shāhnāma, which are mounted in H. 2153, have likewise been rendered in the black pen technique, with similar rocks, bushes, tufts of grass, and tiny trees.

A dramatic landscape painting in that album, Two Riders in a Wintry Landscape with Bears, is attributed by an inscription to Ahmad Musa along with a written aesthetic evaluation (fig. 17). Not belonging to the Jalayirid Shāhnāma, this independent, snow-covered landscape painting features two hunters on horseback chasing a pair of running bears. It is inscribed upside down with the following connoisseurial assessment: “Work of Master Ahmad Musa, very good!” (kār-i Ustād Aḥmad Mūsā bisyār nīk).¹¹⁵ A curious note in a different script, written in front of the bears, may record a spontaneous emotional reaction, perhaps by a young viewer, to the painting: “Bad bear!” (khirs-i bad). Carrying bows and arrows, both hunters ride toward the foreground of this astounding landscape painting, behind the ridge of a hill.

The unnaturally sloping, barren terrain depicted from an elevated vantage point is strewn with mushroom-like Taihu stones at the foot of leafless trees, with two pairs of birds perched on their branches, accompanied by a pair of resting deer. One of the two barren trees near the deer, and the two pairs of trees along the riverfront, are rendered in the black pen technique, unlike other trees that are painted brown. Such doubling of creatures and natural features would become a convention in Persianate landscape and animal painting. The dark blue sky, partly visible from both sides of the hill, has a wavy stream of light gray and pink clouds, reminiscent of those in the miniscule fragment with angels peering through clouds (fig. 7). Wavy ripples cover the foreboding dark silver river flowing in the foreground. The landscape is painted with predominantly pinkish beige and light purple hues, against which the riders wearing fur-lined hats stand out with their bright red and green coats. Unlike this painting with a vertical format, landscapes by Ahmad Musa generally have horizontal compositions. However, they too deploy an elevated vantage point, inspired by Chinese models (see fig. 11a).¹¹⁶

Whereas the Jalayirid Shāhnāma illustrations feature conspicuous motifs in the black pen technique, inserted into otherwise polychrome paintings, some later fourteenth-century images were executed entirely in black ink (fig. 18). This suggests that the two techniques were compatible and interrelated before becoming increasingly independent of one another. One such autonomous black pen drawing in H. 2153, Rustam Kills a Dragon, has been attributed to the Jalayirid master painter Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy and dated to the late fourteenth century. Its mountainous round landscape, with tiny birds flying in the sky, is surrounded by porous mushroom-like rocks with trees and shrubs sprouting out. In the lower left corner, two flat jagged rocks lie at the foot of tiny trees. Similar flocks of birds in the skies as well as rocks with trees are often seen in Jalayirid images mounted in H. 2153.¹¹⁷ The rest of the foreground in Rustam Kills a Dragon is lined with twisted barren branches, resembling those depicted in Ahmad Musa’s Shāhnāma paintings from the early 1370s (see figs. 15, 16). The Freer Dīvān’s black pen illustrations are more refined and varied, in keeping with a date in the 1390s.

Landscape paintings from the early Jalayirid period include relatively uninviting, dramatic terrains with bare gnarled trees and porous rocks like their Mongol Ilkhanid predecessors. The lyricism of more naturalistic landscapes in the Freer Dīvān comes closer in spirit to late fourteenth-century Jalayirid black ink drawings in H. 2153, two of which can perhaps be attributed to Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy (figs. 19, 20).¹¹⁸ Alternatively, but less likely, a date in the first decade of the fifteenth century may be proposed for both drawings, after this artist had been carried away to Timurid Samarqand. Given the rarity of these two vertically oriented preparatory black ink drawings, they are framed by partially preserved gold and lapis lazuli rulings.

One of these ink drawings depicts a royal procession along a steep mountainous landscape, overseen by four protective angels hovering above in the sky (fig. 19).¹¹⁹ The angels that seem to bless the procession bear a striking resemblance to those depicted in the Freer Dīvān, which some studies have attributed to Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy (fig. 6).¹²⁰ A partly visible domed building, along with spongelike hills and bushes, appears in the lower half of this landscape drawing. A man entering the picture frame from the lower right side holds the reins of camels walking behind him. Along a horizontal path above those hills, the procession includes a pair of footmen, followed by two horse riders, one of them carrying a flag behind the other, who may be a grandee. In front of the footman, a child, perhaps a crown prince, is sitting in a square palanquin carried by two men walking behind and in front of it, while a third person holds a high royal umbrella over the palanquin.

Steep mountains rise above the procession path, their two peaks crowned by settlements containing cubical buildings. My attribution of this black ink drawing to Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy finds additional support in one of the abovementioned miniscule drawings in the same album (fig. 8c). Accompanied by an inscription that reads “ʿAmal-i [work of] Khvāja ʿAbd al-Ḥayy,” the drawing depicts two pairs of horizontal, almond-shaped rocks, and two steep mountains, each crowned by cubical structures.¹²¹

Attributable to the same artist, the second black ink drawing in H. 2153 is very similar. (fig. 20).¹²² It too has a vertical format and illustrates a series of mountains with a valley in between, behind which rise the same type of cubical buildings as seen in figure 19. Instead of angels, tiny birds fly in the sky. This second landscape has more-abundant vegetation than the first one, and the procession in it is more crowded, though there is no palanquin. In the middle ground, the all-male riders are led by a horseman carrying a flag and by a mounted trumpet player. The ruler on horseback is accompanied by an officer with a royal umbrella, raised on a tall pole.

Once again, a man who is leading camels by the reins enters the picture frame from the right side. In front of him, a train of mules is led by another man advancing diagonally between the hills in the foreground toward the royal procession. In the lower right corner, riders on horseback follow a mounted archer who is hunting two mountain goats. The hills in front are scattered with almond-shaped flat stones, resembling those depicted in Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy’s miniscule sketch (fig. 8c). Such distinctive stones are also seen in the foreground of the previous landscape drawing, which forms a closely related set with this one. Moreover, their subject is connected to the recurring theme of processions in albums H. 2153 and H. 2160, an example being the Triumphal Procession drawing in the “Frankish manner” (fig. 9).¹²³

If these two Jalayirid black ink drawings of mountainous landscapes, each with a royal procession, date from the first decade of the fifteenth century rather than the 1390s, they could refer to a particular context (figs. 19, 20). Upon Timur’s death in 1405, both Sultan Ahmad Jalayir and Qara Yusuf Qaraqoyunlu were released from prison in Mamluk Damascus, where they had fled. The Jalayirid ruler adopted Qara Yusuf’s newborn child Pir Budaq as his own son and agreed to keep Iraq, while relinquishing Azerbaijan to his prison mate via Pir Budaq. Between 1406 and 1408, Qara Yusuf recaptured Tabriz and Azerbaijan from the Timurids. By March 1407, the abovementioned second copy of Sultan Ahmad’s Dīvān, which lacks black pen illustrations, was produced in Baghdad after his safe return to that city from exile. Could the set of two inter- related drawings in H. 2153, Mountainous Landscape with a Royal Procession, commemorate these momentous events, with the child carried in a palanquin representing Sultan Ahmad Jalayir’s adopted son Pir Budaq, and the second drawing depicting the prince’s father Qara Yusuf?

The Jalayirid ruler would be executed in 1410 by his Qaraqoyunlu ally Qara Yusuf because he had tried to recapture Tabriz against their agreement. Before being killed, Sultan Ahmad Jalayir had to sign documents confirming the appointment of his adopted son Pir Budaq as the ruler of Azerbaijan with its capital Tabriz, while Qara Yusuf was to reign as Pir Budaq’s vice regent. In 1411 Qara Yusuf’s elder son seized Baghdad, which precipitated the demise of the Jalayirids. That year, Qara Yusuf publicly announced in Tabriz the sultanate of Pir Budaq, with himself as vice-regent.

Though highly speculative, these events might provide a possible context (ca. 1407–11) for both preparatory ink drawings in H. 2153 that depict connected royal processions. Otherwise, these two drawings in a vertical format are stylistically attributable to Khwaja ʿAbd al-Hayy (before 1393 or 1401), without a specific historical narrative. Both delicate landscape drawings expertly incorporate minute details, with clear foreground and background. They were more suitable than the generally horizontal landscapes of Ahmad Musa for the vertical codex format, which around that time began to replace horizontal layouts inspired by Chinese handscrolls. Besides procession scenes in the Frankish and Cathayan manners, which were ideal subjects for scrolls, albums H. 2153 and H. 2160 feature horizontal scrolls with ornamental patterns. Several scrolls were cut up into pieces and preserved in both albums when the vertical codex format became the norm (see figs 25a-c).¹²⁴

One such handscroll colorfully painted on paper, Court Ladies in a Riverfront Palace Garden, has been attributed to fifteenth-century Ming China. Combining its ten or more cut-up fragments in H. 2153 reveals that it represented Chinese ladies enjoying food, music, and dance inside a garden palace, featuring a kitchen annex for cooks, and an upper belvedere where some ladies observe the landscape. Others stroll in the garden replete with flowering trees, birds, and butterflies. The garden overlooks a delightful rivulet bordered by a colored marble parapet, from which some of the ladies and a child lean to view the ducks, herons, and lotus leaves with flowers floating along the swirling waves (figs. 21, 27b, 28a).¹²⁵ Such riverscape motifs were favorite components of some ornamental black-pen-design scrolls in that album.

This predominantly polychrome-painted Chinese handscroll features some black pen details, such as black-and-white butterflies, the skirt of a lady, the coat of another lady, and various objects held by others not illustrated here.¹²⁶ A similar combination of techniques in some illustrations of the Jalayirid Shāhnāma reveals a shared characteristic with Chinese painting. However, such a mixture was also common in “semi-grisaille” black-and-white paintings of early fourteenth-century French manuscripts, which include some polychrome sections in red, brown, and blue.¹²⁷ This reminds us that we must not underestimate the imbrication of Cathayan and Frankish elements in the Jalayirid artistic tradition.

Some black pen landscapes in the Freer Dīvān have vertical formats like those in H. 2153, which I have tentatively attributed above to Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy (figs. 19, 20). One such example, River Scene, features a prominent river bordered by shrubs, a barren tree, and horizontal, almond-shaped rocks (fig. 22). The rocks are nearly identical to those depicted in Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy’s miniscule black ink drawing in H. 2153 (fig. 8c). Without any human figures, the Dīvān’s sinicizing River Scene is populated by ducks swimming along the river’s undulating currents, while butterflies, geese, and cranes fly among spiraling Chinese cloud bands.¹²⁸

Animal and vegetal motifs in the Dīvān’s landscapes also resemble those in sinicizing ornamental design scrolls compiled in the Diez and Topkapı albums. However, landscapes of the Dīvān cannot be classified as “ornament,” given their implicit narrative dimension. Instead, they occupy a liminal zone between decorative illuminations and narrative illustrations. The sequence of black pen drawings in the Dīvān must also be taken into consideration, along with the selective use of color in only some scenes at the midpoint of the manuscript, as Farhad has observed.¹²⁹ Moreover, these landscapes omit mythical Chinese creatures such as the dragon and phoenix (simurgh) in combat, or threatening animals such as the wolves, lions, and bears that are featured in ornamental black pen designs mounted in H. 2153 and H. 2160 (see fig. 26).¹³⁰

An example of ornamental motifs in H. 2160 is particularly relevant for design elements deployed in the Dīvān’s landscapes (fig. 23). It is a large, full-page ornament study identified as the “Work of Amir Davlatyar” (kār-i Amīr Davlatyār) by an inscription that may be a signature. The artist of this sheet was the outstanding Jalayirid master of black pen design mentioned above in Dust Muhammad’s preface as a former ghulām of the last Ilkhanid ruler, Abu Saʿid (d. 1335). He was trained by Master Ahmad Musa, while his own pupil Master Shamsuddin instructed Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy, who became the tutor and foremost court painter of Sultan Ahmad Jalayir.

Therefore, this extraordinary sheet with mid-fourteenth-century decorative designs by Amir Davlatyar belongs to the chain of master-disciple relationships that culminated in the Freer Dīvān. Framed by black-lined gold rulings, the sheet contains five models of corner pieces meant for decorating the margins of manuscripts. However, these ornamental patterns were also adaptable to textiles, manuscript bindings, and other surfaces such as the Freer Dīvān’s flexible margins. For instance, Landscape with Two Couples in the Dīvān features similar swimming duck patterns on the central bedspread, and on the robe of the lady standing next to a tree in the left margin (fig. 12). In the sheet with five corner pieces, the name of Amir Davlatyar is written on the design with swimming and flying ducks that alternate with Chinese cloud bands. The ducks are very similar to those in the River Scene of the Dīvān (fig. 22). The corner piece to the left side of the inscribed design in figure 23 includes three larger ducks swimming among lotuses in the “Cathayan manner.” The two corner pieces at the right side of the inscribed design in figure 23 feature lotus and long, bladelike leaf patterns, also common as riverscape motifs.

Two other black pen designs in H. 2160, which belonged to an ornament scroll, have been cut up and ascribed to the same artist: “ʿamal-i [work of] Mīr Davlatyār.” They delineate snakelike dragons entangled in lotus leaves.¹³¹ By contrast, Amir [Mir] Davlatyar’s three stunning black pen designs in H. 2153 are self-contained ornamental paintings (figs. 24a–c). Framed by rulings, these autonomous designs stand out as highly accomplished, finished artworks, each inscribed as “kār-i [work of] Amīr Davlatyār.” It is not surprising that when the aforementioned Timurid artist Mavlana Valiullah, “who was without equal in the world,” saw Amir Davlatyar’s work, “he justly confessed his inability to match it,” according to Dust Muhammad.¹³²

One of these three imaginative designs depicts a pair of birds attacking a snake that emerges from the holes of a surreal Taihu stone, amid flowers, a bent tree with holes and bulges on its trunk, as well as Chinese cloud bands (fig. 24a).¹³³ In the second design, two roosters, each perched on a Taihu stone, confront one another symmetrically across flowering plants in the middle (fig. 24b).¹³⁴ The third design shows a heron biting the neck of a tortoise that is swimming along swirling waves, flanked by two tall plants with pink flowers and green leaves under a sky brimming with wavelike Chinese cloud bands (fig. 24c).¹³⁵

Unlike the superior artistry of these “finished” black-pen decorative paintings, datable to the mid-fourteenth century, a fourth polychrome painting inscribed as the “work of Amir Davlatyar” in H. 2153 is rather mediocre. It illustrates a horse rider in armor attacking with his sword another horseman.¹³⁶ This indicates the general accuracy of Dust Muhammad’s concise comments, as a connoisseur, on the special skills of individual artists: In the case of Amir Davlatyar, it was only black pen design.¹³⁷ Likewise, attributive inscriptions in albums H. 2153 and H. 2160 are generally more reliable than is commonly assumed.

The fragments of a sinicizing scroll preserved in both albums document the emergence of semi-narrative, black-pen landscape drawings with human figures and animals around the time the Freer Dīvān was created. Datable to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, probably in Tabriz or Baghdad, this paper scroll with a continuous drawing in black ink was cut up into three horizontal pieces, each framed by gold and lapis lazuli rulings (figs. 25a–c). The scroll depicts a seated Mongol amir holding a scepter and accompanied by standing attendants who carry emblems of royalty. He is viewing the parade of a horse, a camel, and a lion, presumably being presented as gifts or tribute, each led by their keepers. They too wear the same Mongol costumes and headgear as the amir and his attendants, which implies that this is a domestic rather than foreign embassy.¹³⁸

A kneeling envoy, flanked by a charming pair of lapdogs, is shown offering the Mongol amir a round object. The large tree next to the seated amir has an auspicious peacock perched above him on its bent trunk. The flat landscape features tiny birds flying or perched on branches, with Chinese cloud bands against a blank background. Each of the three scroll fragments is anchored by a prominent bent and leafy tree, with protruding roots, knobs, and holes on its trunk. Such monumental trees often play a role as spatial markers in contemporaneous black pen images with empty backdrops, including the Dīvān’s margin illustrations (see figs. 10, 12, 22). A tall tree with trunk holes and a bent barren tree included in the woodblock print Twenty-Four Paragons of Filial Piety reminds us of the Chinese origin of these motifs commonly deployed in Jalayirid landscapes (see fig. 1c).¹³⁹

An ink drawing in one of the Diez albums attributed by an inscription to Amir Davlatyar’s renowned student Master Shamsuddin, who flourished in the fourteenth century during the reign of Shaykh Uvays, depicts a large plane tree likely removed from H. 2153.¹⁴⁰ Its bent trunk has holes with leafy branches that are inhabited by birds. The fox beneath that tree is staring at a rock, the curious form of which echoes the fox’s face. In the more naturalistic landscapes of Shamsuddin’s student Khvaja ʿAbd al-Hayy, such “rock faces” are no longer common. These relatively “humanized” landscapes have shed the animistic aura of early Jalayirid and Ilkhanid precedents.¹⁴¹

In album H. 2160, another paper scroll with a delicately drawn, black pen landscape is lighly tinted in brown, pink, orange, blue, and gold. It was cut up into five pieces without rulings and measured approximately 1.787 meters by 17.7 centimeters. The scroll fragments depict a sinicizing dense forest inhabited by diverse animals. The fragment of Inhabited Forest illustrated here features intertwined and gnarled bent trees with trunk holes, flowering plants, shrubs, Taihu stones, flat rocks, dragons, a simurgh, bears, birds, butterflies, and Chinese cloud bands (fig. 26). Wearing short-sleeved coats, three riders on horseback with long hair and headcaps topped by a feather tassel are shown attacking a dragon. One of these figures is an unfinished line drawing of an archer.¹⁴²

Interestingly, the costumes and headgear of the three riders are almost identical to those worn by an authoritarian officer on horseback depicted in the upper left corner of Camp Scene in the Freer Dīvān (fig. 10). The cut-up album scroll, datable to the early fifteenth century, is labeled in most fragments as the “Work of Master Muhammad Black Pen” (ʿamal-i [or] kār-i Ustād Muḥammad Siyāh Qalam), who may have been active in Qaraqoyunlu Turkmen Tabriz. However, the scroll is generally attributed to Timurid Herat or more broadly Central Asia.¹⁴³

To this scroll fragment, where creatures are perpetually at war, the remaining fragments add animals such as chʿi-lins, deer, wolves, foxes, lions, monkeys, and even the heron-biting-a- tortoise motif. Once again, these tinted black pen designs have a semi-narrative dimension, though not as peaceful as those of the Freer Dīvān, whose serene landscape scenes are populated by human beings, domesticated animals, and birds. Black pen images of inhabited dense forests, with and without riders fighting ferocious beasts, became popular items in albums. Two less delicate examples, with a horizontal, single-page format, have been attributed to Timurid Herat in the first half of the fifteenth century.¹⁴⁴

As mentioned, the paired Topkapı albums H. 2153 and H. 2160 also feature numerous scroll patterns in black ink for application in decorative arts, including designs for cloud collars, triangular armbands, and semicircular mudguards for horse saddles in the “Cathayan manner.” Such designs enjoyed currency in the Jalayirid, Timurid, Turkmen, and early Safavid courts. Decorative black pen drawings in both Topkapı albums may also have bolstered the fashion for sinicizing patterns in diverse media at the Ottoman court.¹⁴⁵ However, the taste for chinoiserie would not travel further west into North Africa and Spain; nor was its impact particularly strong in Mamluk Syria-Egypt and Sultanate India.

Concluding Remarks

I hope that my analysis of selected images from album H. 2153 and its companion may encourage further studies with new perspectives on the Jalayirid pictorial tradition. As we have seen, some of the works mounted in this album document the copying and creative transformation of Frankish as well as Cathayan models. Those foreign models were successfully integrated into the mature Jalayirid pictorial idiom of the Freer Dīvān. I would like to conclude by briefly drawing attention to a workshop practice documented in album H. 2153, namely the copying of models as study exercises.¹⁴⁶ Known as mashq, meaning study or exercise, this training method was common among calligraphers and painter-decorators.

Attributive inscriptions on paintings and drawings in that album sometimes identify them as an exercise (mashq) rather than a work (ʿamal, kār), drawing (qalam), or sketch (ṭarḥ) by a named artist or in a particular regional style. The differences among these terms do not always seem clear today. Moreover, an “exercise or study” based on copying could be considered an artwork demonstrating the extraordinary skill of the copyist. As Tanındı has observed, “the numerous repetitions of pictures” in album H. 2153, even up to four copies, and to a lesser extent in H. 2160, indicate that artists were not only “honing their skills by making identical or similar copies of works by ancient masters.” Some of them were partial, rather than identical copies, through which the artist could introduce variations or a new style: “All these pictures reveal that artists carefully examined works of past masters. . . . The legitimacy of the tradition of copying in pictorial art also meant that these pictures represent a rich archive” of now lost originals.¹⁴⁷

Copying, whether fully, partially, or inventively, was sanctioned as a key method for developing artistic skills. The unrestrained hybridity of some images in album H. 2153 reveals that the practice of copying admired prototypes was complemented by an overlooked transcultural dimension extending from China to Europe. This album vividly documents the blending of the Persianate, Cathayan, and Frankish manners. Images in all three idioms are even juxtaposed on some album pages. One of the Europeanizing tinted brown-ink drawings that I have published previously, King Getting Undressed in Front of a Reclining Female Nude (late fourteenth or early fifteenth century), is pasted on such a page with a vertically stacked tripartite layout (figs. 27a–c).¹⁴⁸ The drawing in the “Frankish manner” is accompanied by a fifteenth-century Persianate black ink drawing of two warriors on horseback, and a fragment of the abovementioned polychrome paper handscroll from fifteenth-century Ming China (fig. 21). This page therefore comprises images from three different artistic traditions: Persianate, Cathayan, and Frankish.

Another page in H. 2153 with a tripartite layout includes a Europeanizing tinted brown-ink drawing with a Biblical subject (figs. 28a–c).¹⁴⁹ The heavily restored, damaged drawing on paper has been identified by Julian Raby as Two Studies of Samson Rending the Lion, which again exemplifies the workshop practice of copying.¹⁵⁰ A previously unnoted, cropped Persian inscription at the left edge of the paper sheet appropriately reads “rending” (darīdan). This work is mounted next to another fragment of the fifteenth-century polychrome Ming-period handscroll, which consists of a tree, flowering plants, and birds (figs. 21, 27b). Moreover, the Samson drawing is adjacent to the aforementioned Jalayirid landscape in black ink (fig. 19). Therefore, this album page once again invites comparisons between the Frankish, Cathayan, and Persianate manners of depiction.

A surprising painted analogue to the Europeanizing drawing Two Studies of Samson Rending the Lion has been noted by Raby in the same album (fig. 29b). This Siyah Qalam Lion Rider, datable to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, is part of a study sheet belonging to the enigmatic group of images in H. 2153 attributed by inscriptions to “Muhammad Siyah Qalam.”¹⁵¹ However, I would add that it differs in several details from Two Studies of Samson Rending the Lion in the “Frankish manner” (fig. 28b). These include the rider’s bare feet and his hat. Moreover, the beast with a shaggy tail is a “mythical” Chinese lion, whose eyes and hind legs emit flamelike motifs. Yet, both images are clearly interrelated. Hence, Raby has convincingly proposed that the puzzling “Muhammad Siyah Qalam” corpus in H. 2153 had a “European connection,” at least in this example.

The fluttering cape of the two lion riders finds an even closer parallel in an early fifteenth-century landscape painting from Ming China in the same album, Herdsman on Buffalo Returning Home Through a Rainstorm (fig. 30). This detail is seen in the background of that painting, probably based on an earlier image from the Southern Song (1127–79) period. The painting also features buffaloes similar to some of the Freer Dīvān illustrations. Painted in ink and wash on silk with tones of green, brown, and beige, it resembles in color scheme and panoramic expanse one of Ahmad Musa’s sinicizing landscapes in the same album (fig. 11a).¹⁵² To return to Two Studies of Samson Rending the Lion, it is probably a late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century Jalayirid exercise sheet, which exemplifies the hybrid copying of Cathayan and Frankish models (fig. 28b).

My dating of works in H. 2153 implies that its Jalayirid images emerged simultaneously with the so-called International Gothic style in Europe (ca. 1360–1433). Visual cultures in both the West and East were being invigorated around that time by the cosmopolitan fusion of Eurasian artistic traditions. However, the main catalyst behind the new naturalism of Persianate pictorial arts was late Yuan and early Ming China. The “Jalayirid contribution” documented so vividly in album H. 2153 uncovers the key role played by artists and patrons of that dynasty in laying the foundations of future directions for Persianate painting. Works in the album display striking parallels with the Freer Dīvān, including the emphasis on the black pen technique, landscapes, and the use of margins, as well as the synthesis of sinicizing and Europeanizing elements.¹⁵³

One of the reasons why Jalayirid painting and calligraphy have been overshadowed in current scholarship is the Timurid process of imitation and codification, and the volume of production.¹⁵⁴ Eclipsed by the preferred focus on the politically allied Timurid and Aqqoyunlu dynasties, the inventiveness of Jalayirid contributions to Persianate painting awaits further analysis, along with the overlooked role of their Qaraqoyunlu associates.¹⁵⁵ As we have seen, Sultan Ahmad Jalayir and Qara Yusuf Qaraqoyunlu jointly sought refuge from Timur at the Ottoman court in 1400. After Sultan Ahmad’s execution by his former ally Qara Yusuf in 1410, the Qaraqoyunlu Turkmen dynasty became the principal heir of the Jalayirid artistic legacy until the rise of the Aqqoyunlu in 1468.¹⁵⁶

Album H. 2153 prefigured the cross-cultural comparison between the Persianate, Frankish, and Cathayan artistic traditions construed in later Safavid album prefaces. Those texts include the mid-sixteenth-century preface by Dust Muhammad to the Bahram Mirza Album (H. 2154) on which we have focused. Originally featuring only two paintings in the “Frankish manner,” this Safavid album includes four paintings captioned as works by “Cathayan masters” that are juxtaposed with Persianate counterparts for comparison.¹⁵⁷ Album H. 2153, moreover, anticipated the subsequent artistic marginalization of China by Europe with its unprecedented early Renaissance engravings collected in the Ottoman court, and its forward-looking Europeanizing images. During the seventeenth century, the “Frankish manner” would become the primary source of foreign inspiration for Persianate pictorial arts in the courts of early modern Islamic empires, where the black pen technique continued to flourish.