Word: safavid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...decided that it would be nice to bring together the works of that little known period. From his desk in the Fogg, Welch composed a letter to the director of the British Library reference division, the caretaker of one of the two great works of the early Safavid period, asking for his cooperation. "I thought they would scream with pain and say 'What do you mean?' " Welch says...
...Welch was dead wrong. The people at the British Museum liked his idea, as did a number of private donors and museums. Aided by a small yet fanatical team of academics and collectors, Welch traced the whereabouts of the early Safavid paintings, aiming to assemble the greatest collection of 16th century Iranian painting brought together since--surprise--the 16th century. Five years later, that exhibition has already made its way through the British Library in London and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Dubbed "Wonders of the Age" (from a manuscript of the period), the collection now occupies Gallery...
...more than art, the Safavid collection tells a story. It is a story of court intrigue and suspicion, of endless gore ("in a delightful way" says Welch), of fights against beasties (half-lions and half-apes) and hunting campaigns in the Iranian countryside. Beneath all of this lies a complicated story, one that Welch and his partner--Martin Bernard Dickson of Princeton--have deciphered after years of work. "People used to say it was impossible to say who painted what," Welch says, but all that has changed. "I looked harder and longer at paintings than most people do," he explains...
...fruits, compressed into a few square inches of surface. They are also fresher than most European Renaissance paintings because they have been protected between the covers of books, so that the pigment has not faded through exposure to light. The one exception to this is the silver leaf that Safavid artists customarily used to represent water: it has tarnished, turning the garden fountains, the rivers and waterfalls to soot...
...combination of utter vividness, precision of detail and fantasticated, rhythm ical design breathes from nearly all the miniatures, but especially from the work of the Safavid court artist Sultan-Muham mad, for whom this show is in effect a retrospective. In one image of a legendary Persian hero, Rustam Sleeping While Rakhsh Fights the Lion, there is a dazzling play between abstraction and observation...