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Hundreds of years hence, men looking at our world through the illustrations we’ve made won’t understand anything. Desiring to take a closer look, yet lacking the patience, they might feel the embarrassment, the joy, the deep pain and pleasure of observation I now feel as I examine pictures in this freezing Treasury-but they’ll never truly know. As I turned the pages with my old fingers numbed from the cold, my trusty mother-of-pearl-handled magnifying lens and my left eye passed over the pictures like an old stork traversing the earth, little surprised by the view below, yet still astonished to see new things. From these pages withheld from us for years, some of them legendary, I came to know which artist had learned what from whom, in which workshop under which shah’s patronage the thing we now call “style” first took shape, which fabled master had worked for whom, and how, for example, the curling Chinese clouds I knew had spread throughout Persia from Herat under Chinese influence were also used in Kazvin. I would occasionally allow myself an exhausted “Aha!”; but an agony lurked deeper within me, a melancholy and regret I can scarcely share with you for the belittled, tormented, pretty, moon-faced, gazelle-eyed, sapling-thin painters-battered by masters-who suffered for their art, yet remained full of excitement and hope, enjoying the affection that developed between them and their masters and their shared love of painting, before succumbing to anonymity and blindness after long years of toil.
It was with such melancholy and regret that I entered this world of fine and delicate feelings, the possibility of whose depiction my soul had quietly forgotten over years of rendering wars and celebrations for Our Sultan. In an album of collected pictures I saw a red-lipped, thin-waisted Persian boy holding a book on his lap exactly as I was holding one at that moment, and it reminded me of what shahs with a weakness for gold and power always forget: The world’s beauty belongs to Allah. On the page of another album drawn by a young master from Isfahan, with tears in my eyes, I beheld two marvelous youths in love with each other, and was reminded of the love my own handsome apprentices nourished for painting. A tiny-footed, transparent-ski
Oddly, my heart began to quicken and pound. As had happened sixty years ago in my early apprenticeship, while I was looking at some rather indecent illustrations of handsome marble-ski
When I noticed that one of the candlesticks slowly floating through the Treasury was approaching me, I put the album away and randomly opened one of the volumes the dwarf had recently set beside me. This was a special album prepared for shahs: I saw two deer at the edge of a green copse enamored of each other, with jackals watching them in hostile envy. I turned the page: Chestnut and bay horses that could’ve been the work of only one of the old masters of Herat -how spectacular they were! I turned the page: A confidently seated governmental official greeted me from a seventy-year-old picture; I couldn’t determine who it was from the face because he looked like anybody, or so I thought, yet the air of the painting, the seated man’s beard painted in various hues recalled something. My heart beat quickly as I recognized the execution of the magnificent hand in the piece. My heart knew before I did, only he could’ve drawn such a splendid hand: This was the work of Bihzad. It was as if light were gushing from the painting to my face.
I had seen pictures drawn by the Great Master Bihzad a few times before; perhaps because I hadn’t looked at them alone, but in a group of former masters years ago, perhaps because we couldn’t be certain whether it was indeed the work of the great Bihzad, I hadn’t been as taken as I was now.
The heavy moldy darkness of the Treasury chamber seemed to brighten. This beautifully drawn hand merged in my mind with that thin, magnificent arm branded with signs of love, which I’d just now seen. Again, I praised God for showing me such spectacular beauty before I went blind. How do I know I’ll soon be blind? I don’t know! I sensed that I could share this intuition of mine with Black, who’d sidled up to me holding a candle and was looking at the page, but something else came out of my mouth.
“Behold the remarkable rendering of the hand,” I said. “It’s Bihzad.”
My hand went of its own will to hold Black’s, as if it were holding the hand of one of those soft, velvet-ski
“How do you mean?”
I said, “Everything is coming to an end” like a great master who longs for blindness, having devoted his years to a lord or a prince, having created masterpieces in his workshop in the style of the ancients, having even ensured that this workshop had its own style, a great master who knows, whenever his patron lord loses his last battle, that new lords will come in the wake of the plundering enemy, disband the workshop, tear apart bound volumes leaving the pages in disarray and belittle and destroy what remains, including the fine details that he long believed in, that were of his own discovery and that he loved like his own children. But I needed to explain this to Black differently.
“This illustration is of the great Poet Abdullah Hatifi,” I said. “Hatifi was such a great poet that he simply stayed home while everybody else rushed out and toadied up to Shah Ismail after the king took Herat. In response, Shah Ismail personally went all the way to his house on the outskirts of the city to see him. We know this is Hatifi, not from Bihzad’s rendering of Hatifi’s face, but from the writing beneath the illustration, don’t we?”
Black looked at me, indicating “yes” with his pretty eyes. “When we look at the face of the poet in the painting,” I said, “we see that it could be a face like any other face. If Abdullah Hatifi were here, God rest his soul, we could never hope to recognize him from the face in this picture. However, we could do so relying on the illustration in its entirety: There’s something in the ma