The World of Fabulous Fables

Critic Bernard Berenson pored over them by the hour, Matisse and Bonnard learned lessons in color and com position from them, and as early as 1678, Oxford's Bodleian Library cheerfully paid -L-55 for as many illustrated volumes. For connoisseurs, there is no more magical--or diverting--world in miniature than the exquisite illustrations turned out by Persian artists over a period that extended for 600 years down to the 19th century. Culling the best from British collections, London's Victoria and Albert Museum is displaying a matchless, summer-long exhibition of 184 examples to demonstrate that Persian miniatures are, as Director John Pope-Hennessy puts it, "one of the most perfect arts the world has known."

Stars by Day, Light by Night. As fabulous as the workmanship is the entrancing world of fantasy that the Persian miniaturists had to work with. Take the old legend about the lovely heroine Fitna, who poked fun at the king's archery. "Practice makes perfect," she sniped, as he executed one of his master shots. Some bards had it that the king in a pique then rode his camel over her, but others thought Fitna too clever for such an ending. To get back in his good graces, the story goes, she arranged for the king to catch her carrying a cow up a flight of stairs. And how, pray tell, did she manage that? Simple, said Fitna. Ever since the cow was a newborn calf, she had performed the ritual; as its strength grew, so did hers: "Practice makes perfect."

Persian miniaturists who illustrated such tales hundreds of times, practiced their art to such perfection that even today scholars cannot determine whether they used brush or pen. Jewel-like colors were heightened to captivate a patron sultan who had genuine gems. Subject matter was aimed to keep him entertained. To do so, artists indulged exuberant imaginations. The stars shone by day, and daylight prevailed at night. Three men constituted an army, two humps made a range of hills.

Perspective was the least of their worries, since a ubiquitous point of view often enhanced the absurdity of all too human situations. A king, stabbed by his son, can be seen dying in silence so as not to disturb his sleeping wife. And seduction scenes often show spying observers as well as oblivious lovers. Understandably, in time miniature painting became less illustration than a literature in itself, uncommonly rich in innuendo. Its message to modern men seems simply that the message need not be writ large to be a source of a thousand and one delights.

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