Persian Pictures

A happy and energetic race of scholars are archeologists whose camping ground is the Near East. Except for rare cases like the late T. E. Lawrence, they are generally ignored by everybody but fellow professionals. But their patient patchings have from time to time restored wonderful form to old cultures. Such restorations were James Henry Breasted's epochal History of Egypt (1905), Sir Arthur Evans' report on Pre-Hellenic Crete (1921-35). One result is that any good advertising artist now knows more about the very fine arts of the Nile valley and the Aegean islands than Sir Joshua Reynolds, for example, ever guessed.

Most recently illuminated of all Near Eastern art traditions is that of Iran (Persia), whose present Shah welcomes celebration of his country's bygone glories. Chief illuminator is a tall, ruddy gentleman with thin grey hair who lives and labors alternately in a Park Avenue apartment and in a truck on the craggy passes of Iran. Mr. Arthur Upham Pope is director of the ten-year-old American Institute for Iranian Art and Archeology.

With the aid of 72 collaborators from 16 countries, at a cost of about $265,000 and twelve and a half years of work, Mr. Pope's Institute last year finished--and the Oxford University Press last week published--the first three volumes of a colossal, seven-volume Survey of Persian Art containing 200 color plates, 1,300 collotype pages, some 1,800 drawings. Thus made available to anyone with the price ($210) was the handsomest treatment in print of any art tradition.

Charlemagne was buried in a Persian shroud, and the late John Singer Sargent thought a certain Persian carpet "worth all the pictures ever painted." But, as connoisseurs know, weaving was not the only beautiful art of the Persians. Scholars may be engrossed by the Survey's detailed evidence that Persian art began even before Egypt's, that its course from 4000 B.C. to 1700 A.D. is the longest unbroken art tradition in human history, that it was the fountainhead of all Moslem art and the great synthesizer of the Orient, that such structural standbys as ribbed, transversal vaulting and, possibly, such minor techniques as cloisonne enamel were Persian in origin. Artists will be happiest looking at the plates.

To an untutored occidental eye, "quaint" is the word for Persian miniature paintings. Humay Meeting Humayun (see cut), painted on silk about 1430, is a far cry from the type of pseudo-Persian fantasy, with harem maidens, moons and gazelles, affected by occidental illustrators. This painting, 6 by 8 1/2 in., belongs to the Timurid period of 'Persian art, after the Mongol conquerors, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, had brought in Chinese influences. But there is no Chinese depth or shading in the picture. The pure red, gold, blue and green robes of the figures, their rouged cheeks and the formalized tree and flowers are all in the Persian style of clear, brilliant, primarily decorative design.

Persian painters did almost all their work to illustrate tales, poems and the Koran. They were acutely conscious of having just so much space to fill with each picture, and tried to fill it interestingly.

In this, as in the delicacy and purity of their color, they followed the Persian artists in faience ware, whose work is rivaled only by the Chinese.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.