They tell a story in Bukhara that dates back to the time of Abdullah Khan. This Uzbek Khan was a suspicious ruler, and though he didn’t object to more than one artist’s brush contributing to the same illustration, he was opposed to painters copying from one another’s pages-because this made it impossible to determine which of the artists brazenly copying from one another was to blame for an error. More importantly, after a time, instead of pushing themselves to seek out God’s memories within the darkness, pilfering miniaturists would lazily seek out whatever they saw over the shoulder of the artist beside them. For this reason, the Uzbek Khan joyously welcomed two great masters, one from Shiraz in the South, the other from Samarkand in the East, who’d fled from war and cruel shahs to the shelter of his court; however, he forbade the two celebrated talents to look at each other’s work, and separated them by giving them small workrooms on opposite ends of his palace, as far from each other as possible. Thus, for exactly thirty-seven years and four months, as if listening to a legend, these two great masters each listened to Abdullah Khan recount the magnificence of the other’s never-to-be-seen work, how it differed from or was oddly similar to the other’s. Meanwhile, they both lived dying of curiosity about each other’s paintings. After the Uzbek Khan’s life had run its long tortoiselike course, the two old artists ran to each other’s rooms to see the paintings. Later still, sitting upon either edge of a large cushion, holding each other’s books on their laps and looking at the pictures that they recognized from Abdullah Khan’s fables, both the miniaturists were overcome with great disappointment because the illustrations they saw weren’t nearly as spectacular as those they’d anticipated from the stories they’d heard, but instead appeared, much like all the pictures they’d seen in recent years, rather ordinary, pale and hazy. The two great masters didn’t then realize that the reason for this haziness was the blindness that had begun to descend upon them, nor did they realize it after both had gone completely blind, rather they attributed the haziness to having been duped by the Khan, and hence they died believing dreams were more beautiful than pictures.
In the dead of night in the cold Treasury room, as I turned pages with frozen fingers and gazed upon the pictures in books that I’d dreamed of for forty years, I knew I was much happier than the artists in this pitiless story from Bukhara. It gave me such a thrill to know, before going blind and passing into the Hereafter, that I was handling the very books whose legends I’d heard about my whole life, and at times I would murmur, “Thank you, God, thank you” when I saw that one of pages I was turning was even more marvelous than its legend.
For instance, eighty years ago Shah Ismail crossed the river and by the sword reconquered Herat and all of Khorasan from the Uzbeks, whereupon he appointed his brother Sam Mirza governor of Herat; to celebrate this joyous occasion, his brother, in turn, had a manuscript prepared, an illuminated version of a book entitled The Convergence of the Stars, which recounted a story as witnessed by Emir Hüsrev in the palace of Delhi. According to legend, one illustration in this book showed the two rulers meeting on the banks of a river where they celebrated their victory. Their faces resembled the Sultan of Delhi, Keykubad, and his father, Bughra Khan, the Ruler of Bengal, who were the subjects of the book; but they also resembled the faces of Shah Ismail and his brother Sam Mirza, the men responsible for the book’s creation. I was absolutely certain that the heroes of whichever story I conjured while looking at the page would appear there in the sultan’s tent, and I thanked God for giving me the chance to see this miraculous page.
In an illustration by Sheikh Muhammad, one of the great masters of the same legendary era, a poor subject whose awe and affection for his sultan had reached the level of pure love was desperately hoping, as he watched the sultan play polo, that the ball would roll toward him so he could grab it and present it to his sovereign. After he’d waited long and patiently, the ball did indeed come to him, and he was depicted handing it to the sultan. As had been described to me thousands of times, the love, awe and submission that a poor subject aptly feels toward a great khan or an exalted monarch, or that a handsome young apprentice feels toward his master, was rendered here with such delicacy and deep compassion, from the extension of the subject’s fingers holding the ball to his inability to summon the courage to look at the sovereign’s face, that while looking at this page, I knew there was no greater joy in the world than to be apprentice to a great master, and that such submissiveness verging on servility was no less a pleasure than being master to a young, pretty and intelligent apprentice-and I grieved for those who would never know this truth.
I turned the pages, gazing hurriedly but with rapt attention upon thousands of birds, horses, soldiers, lovers, camels, trees and clouds, while the Treasury’s happy dwarf, like a shah of elder days given the opportunity to exhibit his riches and wealth, proudly and undauntedly removed volume after volume from chests and placed them before me. From two separate corners of an iron chest stuffed with amazing tomes, common books and disorderly albums, there emerged two extraordinary volumes-one bound in the Shiraz style with a burgundy cover, the other bound in Herat and finished with a dark lacquer in the Chinese fashion-which contained pages so resembling each other that at first I thought they were copies. While I was trying to determine which book was the original and which the copy, I examined the names of the calligraphers on the colophons, looked for hidden signatures, and finally came to the realization, with a shudder, that these two volumes of Nizami were the legendary books that Master Sheikh Ali of Tabriz had made, one for the Khan of the Blacksheep, Jihan Shah, and the other for the Khan of the Whitesheep, Tall Hasan. After he was blinded by the Blacksheep shah to prevent him from making another version of the first volume, the great master artist took refuge with the Whitesheep khan and created a superior copy from memory. To see that the pictures in the second of the legendary books, made when he was blind, were simpler and purer, while the colors in the first volume were more lively and invigorating, reminded me that the memory of the blind exposes the merciless simplicity of life but also deadens its vigor.
Since I myself am a genuine great master, so acknowledged by Almighty Allah, who sees and knows all, I knew that one day I would go blind, but is this what I wanted now? Since His presence could be sensed quite nearby in the exquisite and terrifying darkness of the cluttered Treasury, like a condemned man who wishes to look upon the world one last time before he is beheaded, I asked Him: “Allow me to see all these illustrations and have my fill of them.”
As I turned the pages, by the force of God’s inscrutable wisdom, I frequently came across legends and matters of blindness. In the famous scene showing Shirin on a countryside outing falling in love with Hüsrev after seeing his picture on the branch of a plane tree, Sheikh Ali Rıza from Shiraz had drawn distinctly all the leaves of the tree one by one so they filled the entire sky. In answer to a fool who saw the work and commented that the true subject of the illustration wasn’t the plane tree, Sheikh Ali replied that the true subject wasn’t the passion of the beautiful young maiden either, it was the passion of the artist, and to proudly prove his point he attempted to paint the same plane tree with all its leaves on a grain of rice. If the signature hidden beneath the beautiful feet of Shirin’s darling lady attendants hadn’t misled me, I was of course seeing the magnificent tree made by the blind master on paper-not the tree made on a grain of rice, which he left half finished, having gone blind seven years and three months after he started the task. On another page, Rüstem blinding Alexander with his forked arrow was depicted in the manner of artists who knew the Indian style, so vivaciously and colorfully, that blindness, the ageless sorrow and secret desire of the genuine miniaturist, appeared to the observer as the prologue to a joyous celebration.
My eyes wandered over these pictures and volumes, no less with the excitement of one who wanted to behold for himself these legends he’d heard about for years than with the worry of an old man who sensed he would soon enough never see anything more. There, in the cold Treasury room suffused with a dark red that I’d never seen before-caused by the color of the cloth and dust within the peculiar light of the candles-I would occasionally cry out in admiration, whereupon Black and the dwarf would rush to my side and look over my shoulder at the magnificent page before me. Unable to restrain myself, I’d begin to explain:
“This color red belongs to the great master Mirza Baba Imami from Tabriz, the secret of which he took with him to the grave. He’s used it for the edges of the carpet, the red of Alevi allegiance on the Persian Shah’s turban, and look, it’s here on the belly of the lion on this page and on this pretty boy’s caftan. Allah never directly revealed this fine red except when He let the blood of his subjects flow. So that we might wearily strive to find this variety of red that is only visible to the naked eye on man-made cloth and in the pictures of the greatest of masters, God did, however, consign its secret to the rarest of insects living beneath stones,” I said and added, “Thanks be to Him who has now revealed it to us.”
“Look at this,” I said much later, once again unable to refrain from showing them a masterpiece-this one could’ve belonged in any collection of ghazals, which spoke of love, friendship, spring and happiness. We looked at the trees of springtime blooming in an array of color, the cypresses in a garden reminiscent of Heaven and the elation of the beloveds reclining in that garden as they drank wine and recited poetry; it was as if we in the moldy, dusty and icy Treasury could also smell those spring blossoms and the delicately scented skin of the joyous revelers. “Notice how the same artist who rendered the forearms of the lovers, their beautiful naked feet, the elegance of their stances and the lazy delight of the birds fluttering about them with such sincerity, also made the crude shape of the cypress in the background!” I said, “This is the work of Lütfi of Bukhara whose ill-temper and belligerence caused him to leave each of his illustrations half finished; he fought with every shah and khan claiming that they understood nothing of painting, and he never remained in one city for long. This great master went from one shah’s palace to another, from city to city, quarreling all the way, never able to find a ruler whose book was deserving of his talents, until he ended up in the workshop of an inconsequential chieftain who ruled over nothing but bare mountaintops. Claiming that ”the khan’s dominions might be small but he knows painting,“ he spent the remaining twenty-five years of his life there. Whether he ever knew that this inconsequential lord was blind remains, even today, a subject of conjecture and a source of humor.”
“Do you see this page?” I said well into the night, and this time they both rushed to my side, candlesticks aloft. “From the time of Tamerlane’s grandchildren to the present, this volume has seen ten owners on its way here from Herat over a span of one hundred fifty years.” Using my magnifying lens, the three of us read the signatures, dedications, historical information and names of sultans-who’d strangled one another-filling every corner of the colophon page, pinched together, between and on top of each other: “This volume was completed in Herat, with the help of God, by the hand of Calligrapher Sultan Veli, son of Muzaffer of Herat, in the year of the Hegira 849 for Ismet-üd Dünya, the wife of Muhammad Juki the victorious brother of the Ruler of the World, Baysungur.” Later still, we read that the book had passed into the possession of the Whitesheep Sultan Halil, thence to his son Yakup Bey, and thence to the Uzbek sultans in the North, each of whom happily amused himself with the book for a time, removing or adding one or two pictures; beginning with the first owner, they added the faces of their beautiful wives to the illustrations and appended their names proudly to the colophon page; afterward, it passed to Sam Mirza who’d conquered Herat, and he made a present of it, with a separate dedication, for his elder brother, Shah Ismail, who in turn brought it to Tabriz and had it prepared as a gift with yet another dedication. When the denizen of paradise Sultan Selim the Grim defeated Shah Ismail at Chaldiran and plundered the Seven Heavens Palace in Tabriz, the book ended up here in this Treasury in Istanbul, after traveling across deserts, mountains and rivers along with the victorious sultan’s soldiers.
How much of an aging master’s interest and excitement did Black and the dwarf share? As I opened new volumes and turned their pages, I sensed the profound sorrow of thousands of illustrators from hundreds of cities large and small, each with a distinctive temperament, each painting under the patronage of a different cruel shah, khan or chieftain, each displaying his talent and succumbing to blindness. I felt the pain of the beatings we all received during our long apprenticeships, the blows inflicted with rulers, until our cheeks turned bright red, or with marble polishing stones upon our shaven heads, as I flipped-with humiliation-through the pages of a primitive book that displayed methods and implements of torture. I had no idea what this miserable book was doing in the Ottoman Treasury: Instead of seeing torture as a necessary practice administered before the supervision of a judge to ensure Allah’s justice in the world, infidel travelers would convince their coreligionists of our cruelty and evil-heartedness by having dishonorable miniaturists abase themselves and dash off these pictures in exchange for a few gold pieces. I was embarrassed at the obvious depraved pleasure with which this miniaturist had drawn pictures of bastinados, beatings, crucifixions, hangings by the neck or the feet, hookings, impalings, firings from cannon, nailings, stranglings, the cutting of throats, feedings to hungry dogs, whippings, baggings, pressings, soakings in cold water, the plucking of hair, the breaking of fingers, the delicate flayings, the cutting off of noses and the removal of eyes. Only true artists like us who’d suffered throughout our apprenticeships merciless bastinados, random pummelings and fists so that the irritable master who drew a line incorrectly might feel better-not to mention hours of blows from sticks and rulers so that the devil within us would perish to be reborn as the jinn of inspiration-only we could feel such extreme joy by depicting bastinados and tortures, only we could color these implements with the gaiety of coloring a child’s kite.
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-skinned, weak and girlish youth had bared a delicate forearm, which aroused in one the desire to kiss it and die, while a cherry-lipped, almond-eyed, sapling-thin, button-nosed beauty of a maiden gazed with wonder-as though viewing three lovely flowers-upon the three small, deep marks of passion the youth had burned onto the inside of that adorable arm to demonstrate the strength of his love and his attachment to her.
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-skinned boys and slim small-breasted maidens drawn in the black-ink style of Tabriz, beads of sweat accumulated on my forehead. I recalled the passion for painting I felt and the depth of thought I experienced when, a few years after I’d married and taken my first steps toward master status, I saw a lovely angel-faced, almond-eyed, rose-petal-skinned youth brought in as an apprentice candidate. For a moment, I had the strong feeling that painting was not about melancholy and regret but about this desire I felt and that it was the talent of the master artist that first transformed this desire into a love of God and then into a love of the world as God saw it; so strong was this feeling that it caused me to relive with ecstatic delight all the years I’d spent over the drawing board until my back was hunched, all the beatings I’d endured while learning my craft, my dedication to courting blindness through illustration and all the agonies of painting I’d suffered and made others suffer. As if running my eyes over something forbidden, I stared long and silently at this wondrous illustration with the same delight. Much later I was still staring. A teardrop slid from my eye over my cheek into my beard.
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-skinned, beautiful apprentice boys, each of whom I’d loved in my youth. His hand was smooth and firm, warmer than my own, delicate and broad, and I was thrilled by the veined side of his wrist. When I was young, I would take an apprentice child’s hand into my palm and, before telling him how to hold the brush, I’d gaze with affection into his sweet, frightened eyes. That’s how I looked at Black. Reflected in his pupils, I saw the flame of the candle he held aloft. “We miniaturists are brethren,” I said, “but now everything is coming to an end.”
“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 manner of the composition, in Hatifi’s pose, in the colors, the gilding and the stunning hand rendered by Master Bihzad that at once indicates the picture is of a poet. Meaning precedes form in the world of our art. As we begin to paint in imitation of the Frankish and Venetian masters, as in the book that Our Sultan had commissioned from your Enishte, the domain of meaning ends and the domain of form begins. However, with the Venetian methods…”
“My Enishte, may he rest in eternal peace, was murdered,” Black said rudely.
I caressed Black’s hand, which rested within my own, as if respectfully stroking the tiny hand of a young apprentice who might one day indeed illustrate masterpieces. Quietly and reverently we looked at Bihzad’s masterpiece for a time. Later, Black withdrew his hand from mine.
“We passed quickly over the chestnut horses on the previous page without examining their noses,” he said.
“There’s nothing to them,” I said, and turned back to the previous page so he might see for himself: There was nothing extraordinary about the nostrils of the horses.
“When shall we find the horses with peculiar noses?” Black asked like a child.
But, in the middle of the night, toward morning, when we found Shah Tahmasp’s legendary Book of Kings in an iron chest beneath piles of various shades of green watered silk and drew it forth, Black was curled up fast asleep on a red Ushak carpet, with his well-formed head lying on a velvet pillow embroidered with pearls. Meanwhile, as soon as I laid eyes upon the legendary tome again after so many years, I quickly understood that the day had only just begun for me.
The legendary volume I’d seen only from afar twenty-five years ago was so large and heavy that Jezmi Agha and I had difficulty lifting and carrying it. When I touched the binding, I knew there was wood within the leather. Twenty-five years ago, upon the death of Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, Shah Tahmasp was so elated to be finally rid of this sultan who’d occupied Tabriz three times, that along with the gift-laden camels he sent to Süleyman’s successor, Sultan Selim, he included a spectacular Koran and this volume, the most beautiful of the books in his treasury. First, a Persian ambassadorial delegation three hundred strong took the tome to Edirne where the new sultan spent the winter hunting; after it arrived here in Istanbul along with the other presents carried on camels and mules, Head Illuminator Black Memi and we three young masters went to see the book before it was locked up in the Treasury. Just like the Istanbulites who would rush to see an elephant brought from Hindustan or a giraffe from Africa, we hurried to the palace where I learned from Master Black Memi that the great Master Bihzad, who’d left Herat for Tabriz in his old age, hadn’t contributed to this book because he’d gone blind.
For Ottoman miniaturists like us who were astonished by ordinary books with seven or eight illustrations, looking through this volume, which contained 250 large illustrations, was like roaming through an exquisite palace while its inhabitants slept. We stared at the incredibly rich pages with a quiet pious reverence as if beholding the Gardens of Paradise that had appeared miraculously for a fleeting moment. And for the following twenty-five years we discussed this book which remained locked in the Treasury.
I silently opened the thick cover of the Book of Kings as if opening a huge palace door. As I turned the pages, each of which made a pleasant rustle, I was overcome by melancholy more than awe.
1. Mindful of the stories suggesting that all the master miniaturists of Istanbul had stolen images from the pages of this book, I couldn’t give my full attention to the pictures.
2. Thinking that I might chance upon a hand drawn by Bihzad in some corner, I couldn’t devote myself wholeheartedly to the masterpieces that appeared in one of every five or six pictures (how decisively and with what grace did Tahmuras lower his mace upon the heads of the demons and giants, who later, in a time of peace, would teach him the alphabet, Greek and various other languages!).
3. The noses of horses and the presence of Black and the dwarf prevented me from surrendering myself to what I saw.
Naturally, I was disappointed to find myself observing more with my mind than with my heart, despite the great luck of having Allah, in His munificence, grant me the chance to have my fill of this legendary book before the velvet curtain of darkness descended over my eyes-the divine grace bestowed upon all great miniaturists. By the time the light of dawn reached the Treasury, which had gradually begun to resemble an icy tomb, I’d gazed upon each of the 259 pictures in this superlative book. Since I looked with my mind, allow me once more to categorize, as if I were an Arab scholar interested only in reasoning:
1. Nowhere could I locate a horse with nostrils that resembled what the wretched murderer had drawn: Not among the variously colored horses that Rüstem encountered while pursuing horse thieves in Turan; not among Feridun Shah’s extraordinary horses which swam the Tigris after the Arab Sultan had denied him permission to do so; not among the gray horses sorrowfully watching Tur’s treachery in beheading his younger brother Iraj, of whom he was jealous because their father, while doling out his territory, gave the best country, Persia, and far away China to Iraj, while leaving only the western lands to Tur; not among the horses of the heroic armies of Alexander that included Khazars, Egyptians, Berbers and Arabs, all equipped with armor, iron shields, indestructible swords and glimmering helmets; not the fabled horse that killed Shah Yazdgird-whose nose bled perpetually as a result of the divine punishment for rebelling against God’s fate-by trampling him on the shores of the green lake whose restorative waters eased his affliction; and not among the hundreds of mythical and perfect horses all drawn by six or seven miniaturists. Yet, there was still more than one entire day ahead of me in which to examine the other books in the Treasury.
2. There’s a claim that has been a persistent topic of gossip among master illuminators for the last twenty-five years: With the express permission of the Sultan, an illustrator entered this forbidden Treasury, found this spectacular book, opened it and by candlelight copied into his sketchbook examples of a number of exquisite horses, trees, clouds, flowers, birds, gardens and scenes of war and love for later use in his work…Whenever an artist created an amazing and exceptional piece, jealousy prompted such gossip from the others, who sought to belittle the picture as nothing but Persian work from Tabriz. Back then, Tabriz was not Ottoman territory. When such slander was directed at me, I felt justifiably angry, yet secretly proud; but when I heard the same accusation about others, I believed it. Now, I sadly realized that in some strange way the four of us miniaturists who’d looked at this book once twenty-five years ago ingrained its images into our memories, and since then, we’ve recalled, transformed, altered and painted them into the books of Our Sultan. My spirits were dampened not by the mercilessness of overly suspicious sultans who wouldn’t take such books out of their treasuries and show them to us, but by the narrowness of our own world of painting. Whether it be the great masters of Herat or the new masters of Tabriz, Persian artists had made more extraordinary illustrations, more masterpieces, than we Ottomans.
Like a lightning flash, it occurred to me how appropriate it’d be if two days hence all my miniaturists and I were put to torture; using the point of my penknife I ruthlessly scraped away the eyes beneath my hand in the picture that lay open before me. It was the account of the Persian scholar who learned chess simply by looking at a chess set brought by the ambassador from Hindustan, before defeating the Hindu master at his own game! A Persian lie! One by one, I scraped away the eyes of the chess players and of the shah and his men who were watching them. Flipping back through the pages, I also pitilessly gouged out the eyes of the shahs who battled mercilessly, of the soldiers of imposing armies bedecked in magnificent armor and of severed heads lying on the ground. After doing the same to three pages, I slid my penknife back into my sash.
My hands trembled, but I didn’t feel so bad. Did I now feel what so many lunatics felt after committing this strange act whose results I encountered frequently during my fifty-year tenure as a painter? I wanted nothing more than blood to flow onto the pages of this book from the eyes I had blinded.
3. This brings me to the torment and consolation awaiting me at the end of my life. No part of this excellent book, which Shah Tahmasp had completed by spurring Persia ’s most masterful artists for ten years, had seen the touch of the great Bihzad’s pen, and his excellent rendering of hands was nowhere to be found. This fact confirmed that Bihzad was blind in the last years of his life, when he fled from Herat -then a city out of favor-to Tabriz. So, I once again decided happily that after he attained the perfection of the old masters by working his entire life, the great master blinded himself to avoid tainting his painting with the desires of any other workshop or shah.
Just then, Black and the dwarf opened a thick volume they were carrying and placed it before me.
“No, this isn’t it,” I said without being contrary. “This is a Mongol Book of Kings: The iron horses of Alexander’s iron cavalry were filled with naphtha and set aflame like lamps, before being set against the enemy with flames shooting from their nostrils.”
We stared at the flaming army of iron copied from Chinese paintings.
“Jezmi Agha,” I said, “we later depicted in the Chronicle of Sultan Selim the gifts that Shah Tahmasp’s Persian ambassadors, who also presented this book, brought with them twenty-five years ago…”
He swiftly located the Chronicle of Sultan Selim and placed it in front of me. Paired with the vibrantly colored page that showed the ambassadors presenting the Book of Kings along with the other gifts to Sultan Selim, my eyes found, among the gifts which were listed one by one, what I’d long ago read but had forgotten because it was so incredible:
The turquoise-and-mother-of-pearl-handled golden plume needle which the Venerated Talent of Herat, Master of Master Illuminators Bihzad, used in the act of blinding his exalted self.
I asked the dwarf where he found the Chronicle of Sultan Selim. I followed him through the dusty darkness of the Treasury, meandering between chests, piles of cloth and carpet, cabinets and beneath stairways. I noticed how our shadows, now shrinking, now enlarging, slipped over shields, elephant tusks and tiger skins. In one of the adjoining rooms, this one also suffused with the same strange redness of cloth and velvet, beside the iron chest whence emerged the Book of Kings, amid other volumes, cloth sheets embroidered with silver and gold wire, raw and unpolished Ceylon stone, and ruby-studded daggers, I saw some of the other gifts that Shah Tahmasp had sent: silk carpets from Isfahan, an ivory chess set and an object that immediately caught my attention-a pen case decorated with Chinese dragons and branches with a mother-of-pearl-inlaid rosette obviously from the time of Tamerlane. I opened the case and out came the subtle scent of burned paper and rosewater; within rested the turquoise-and mother-of-pearl-handled golden needle used to fasten plumes to turbans. I took up the needle and returned to my spot like a specter.
Alone again, I placed the needle that Master Bihzad had used to blind himself upon the open page of the Book of Kings and gazed at it. It wasn’t the needle he’d blinded himself with that made me shudder, but seeing an object he’d taken into his miraculous hands.
Why did Shah Tahmasp send this terrifying needle with the book he’d presented to Sultan Selim? Was it because this Shah, who as a child was a student of Bihzad’s and a patron of artists in his youth, had changed in his old age, distancing poets and artists from his inner circle and giving himself over entirely to faith and worship? Was this the reason he was willing to relinquish this exquisite book, which the greatest of masters had labored over for ten years? Had he sent this needle so all would know that the great artist was blinded of his own volition or, as was rumored for a time, to make the statement that whosoever beheld the pages of this book even once would no longer wish to see anything else in this world? In any event, this volume was no longer considered a masterpiece by the Shah, who felt poignant regret, afraid that he’d committed a sacrilege through his youthful love of illustrating, as happened with many rulers in their old age.
I was reminded of stories told by spiteful illuminators who’d grown old to find their dreams unfulfilled: As the armies of the Blacksheep ruler, Jihan Shah, were poised to enter Shiraz, Ibn Hüsam, the city’s legendary Head Illuminator, declared, “I refuse to paint in any other way,” and had his apprentice blind him with a hot iron. Among the miniaturists that the armies of Sultan Selim the Grim brought back to Istanbul after the defeat of Shah Ismail, the capture of Tabriz and the plunder of the Seven Heavens Palace was an old Persian master who it was rumored blinded himself with medicines because he believed he could never bring himself to paint in the Ottoman style-not as the result of an illness he’d had on the road as some claimed. To set an example for them, I used to tell my illuminators in their moments of frustration how Bihzad had blinded himself.
Was there no other recourse? If a master miniaturist made use of the new methods here and there in out-of-the-way places, couldn’t he then, if only a little, save the entire workshop and the styles of the old masters?
There was a dark stain on the extremely sharp point of the elegantly tapered plume needle, yet my weary eyes couldn’t determine whether it was blood or not. Lowering the magnifying lens, as if beholding a melancholy depiction of love with a matching sense of melancholy, I looked at the needle for a long time. I tried to imagine how Bihzad could’ve done it. I’d heard that one doesn’t go blind immediately; the velvety darkness descends slowly, sometimes after days, sometimes after months, as with old men who go blind naturally.
I’d caught sight of it while passing into the next room; I stood and looked, yes, there it was: an ivory mirror with a twisted handle and thick ebony frame, its length nicely embellished with script. I sat down again and gazed at my own eyes. How beautifully the flame of the candle danced in my pupils-which had witnessed my hand paint for sixty years.
“How had Master Bihzad done it?” I asked myself once more.
Never once taking my eyes off the mirror, with the practiced movements of a woman applying kohl to her eyelids, my hand found the needle on its own. Without hesitation, as if making a hole at the end of an ostrich egg soon to be embellished, I bravely, calmly and firmly pressed the needle into the pupil of my right eye. My innards sank, not because I felt what I was doing, but because I saw what I was doing. I pushed the needle into my eye to the depth of a quarter the length of a finger, then removed it.
In the couplet worked into the frame of the mirror, the poet had wished the observer eternal beauty and wisdom-and eternal life to the mirror itself.
Smiling, I did the same to my other eye.
For a long while I didn’t move. I stared at the world-at everything.
As I’d surmised, the colors of the world did not darken, but seemed to bleed ever so gently into one another. I could still more or less see.
The pale light of the sun fell over the red and oxblood cloth of the Treasury. In the accustomed ceremony, the Head Treasurer and his men broke the seal and opened the lock and the door. Jezmi Agha changed the chamber pots, lamps and brazier, brought in fresh bread and dried mulberries and announced to the others that we would continue searching for the horses with oddly drawn nostrils within Our Sultan’s books. What could be more exquisite than looking at the world’s most beautiful pictures while trying to recollect God’s vision of the world?