Expert Voices: William Dalrymple on the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp

The Shatamasp Shahnameh is not only one of the great artworks of Persia, but also the folio that we have here is one of the great artworks to be auctioned in our time. The Shahnameh of Ferdowsi is the great national epic of Iran. It was written by Ferdowsi and it brings together the early history, mythology and legends of Iran, but also preserving and saving the Persian language. Formerly known as the Hoten Shahnameh after Arthur Hoten who owned it and dispersed it in the 1970s and 80s, scholars today prefer to call it the Shatamasp Shahnameh after its original patron. There were 258 illustrated pages in the Shatamasp Shahnameh. So great an epic undertaking was this that it actually took two generations of artists. Shah Ismail, who founded the Safavid dynasty, was the first Persian to really unite the whole of Persia under a Persian monarch. He also created a great renaissance of Persian culture and Persian painting. He brought together the greatest painters of his day, including Sultan Muhammad and Mirza Ali, the painter of this page, and this work is one of his first great masterpieces. This enormous undertaking takes two generations. The painting of the manuscript began in the 1520s and it was probably completed in the 1530s. By the 1560s this manuscript ends up in Ottoman Turkish hands, the property of Selim II. It was a gift from Shatamasp. It made its way to the Topkapi Palace where it remained for several centuries until early in the 20th century it came to Paris where it ended up in the Rothschild collections and then it was sold by the Rothschilds to Arthur Houghton. The Shatamasp Shahnameh is a fabulous compendium of stories and the folio that we have here is from the sequence about the hero Rustam, who's one of the great heroes of Persian culture. What you see in this particular folio is the moment that Rustam actually stumbles across these horses grazing. He's got his lasso out, he's about to try and recapture Raksh and at the same time the two herdsmen have noticed that a thief is afoot and they are waking up. One of them is touching his mouth with his finger, a sign of astonishment in Persian miniature painting, and what you have all around this centre of action is this glorious Persian natural beauty. You have trees which are spiralling out of the frame, you have two little partridges sitting on a branch, a nest full of fledglings, you get the nature sort of bursting out of the frame in this gorgeous way. It's by far the most elaborate shahnameh ever painted. Individually its pictures rank as some of the greatest masterpieces of painting of any era. It is to Persian painting what the Book of Kells is to Celtic art, what the Trériche is to Burgundian painting. Pages come up very rarely and this is a spectacular opportunity to acquire one of the great masterpieces of world art.