 خانوم ها و آغایان سرورانه گرامی به دانشکده پجوهش های خواورش ناسی و آفریغایی دانشگاهه لندن خوشامدید. Welcome to SOAZ and to the 2022 Combran Jam Biennial Lectures that are hosted by the Center for Iranian Studies under the auspices of SOAZ Middle East Institute. My name is Narges Farzad. I'm a senior lecturer in Persian Studies at the School of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics and I also chair the Center for Iranian Studies at the moment. It is wonderful to see you all after a period of separation in the COVID years and it's nice not just to put a shirt on top and pyjama bottoms when we all met on Zoom. The Jam Lectures started ten years ago in 2012, a year after SOAZ received a most generous gift from the Faridun Jam Charitable Trust to promote Persian and Iranian Studies at SOAZ. The Lectures series focus on Persian literature, the art of the book and aspects of Iranian history and those who are invited to speak at these events focus on their latest publications and give us a glimpse of the depth and breadth of their scholarship and one of the world's oldest and richest cultures. It gives me immense personal and institutional privilege and delight that Professor Robert Hillenbrand, Fellow of the British Academy, Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, has so graciously accepted our invitation to be our speaker at the 10th anniversary of the Jam Lectures as well as allow us to celebrate with him the launch of his splendid new book, The Great Mongol Shah Nami, the eponymous title of this week's two lectures. More on the launch of the book later. And of course I am delighted that Professor Carol Hillenbrand and Professor Margaret Hillenbrand, the family are also here. Thank you for joining us. Professor Hillenbrand and I exchanged quite a few emails in preparations for this evening and tomorrow's lectures and the only terse missives that went back and forth were the ones when I insisted that I like to include at least 50% of the list of his publications, positions held in academia and journals and books edited, PhD students supervised and junior colleagues mentored, not to mention his media appearances and consultancies for institutions and auction houses who have sought his expertise over the years. And for him to sternly insist that he'd like me to name but a few of his works. As always, he wins. Mind you, the program booklet would have been several pages longer if he had given in. So in brief bullet points, Professor Robert Hillenbrand was educated at the universities of Cambridge and Oxford and joined the department of fine arts at University of Edinburgh in 1971, where he was later awarded a chair of Islamic art in 1989. Professor Hillenbrand retired from the University of Edinburgh in December 2007, but only to hop a few, I think, tens of miles across to the five coast and to start teaching at the University of St. Andrews from 2013 to 2021. He is currently an honorary professorial fellow in the department of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at the University of Edinburgh and emeritus professor of fine art at the same institution. He is also the honorary professor of Islamic art at the School of Art History at the University of St. Andrews. His travels have taken him throughout the Islamic world. He has held visiting professorships at Princeton, UCLA, Bamberg, Leiden, New York, Cairo, Dartmouth College and Groeningen and was slayed professor of art at Cambridge in 2008. His 11 books include imperial images in Persian painting, the prize winning Islamic architecture, form, function and meaning, Islamic art and architecture, the architecture of Ottoman Jerusalem, the Holy Ark of Isfahan and four volumes and collected articles. He has also co-authored, edited or co-edited a further 14 books. He has served on numerous editorial boards and was Islamic art advisor to the 36th volume Macmillan Dictionary of Art. He has also served on the councils of the British School of Archaeology in Jerusalem, British Research in the Levant and the British Institute of Persian Studies where he served as vice president. And there is another entry, Robert, which I don't think I have told you about before. Very early on in my courtship with George, my late husband, and that's a bit of an old fashioned turn of phrase, isn't it? When he was finding out about my Iranian world and I about his Abedonian roots, one evening he looked me in the eyes and I held my breath and he said, do you know Robert Hillenbrand? And rather startled, I said, yes, if you mean Professor Robert Hillenbrand. And I thought, I think I may have just passed the first test, the first one of the half trons. And he said, and his reply was good, that's very good to hear. And added that when he was a student of English and philosophy at Edinburgh, he would skip quite a few of his lectures to come to your history of art classes and how he had loved them and learned so much from them. And I thought, what more can a girl ask than a man so discerning about the classes he missed and the lectures that he gate crashed. And of course, over the years, he loved every single lecture that you gave in London and he could come to. Anyway, ladies and gentlemen, on that diversion, please join me to invite Professor Robert Hillenbrand to deliver his first of two lectures entitled, What makes the great Mongol Shah Nome great? Well, thank you very much, Nagas, who could ask for a warmer introduction than the one you've just given me. Let's get straight to it. This evening, I will try to define exactly what makes the great Mongols, Shah Nome, deserve that adjective, great. Such an inquiry is essentially subjective, but that doesn't make it valueless. Perhaps the most fruitful way to proceed is to investigate the contemporary context from which this manuscript sprang. That context has several factors, political, cultural, literary and religious, to name but for. There's no time today to examine these in the necessary detail. So instead, I want to begin by focusing on the one context that would have been of absorbing interest to the painters who created this wonderful manuscript. Namely, how could they improve on what came before and on what their colleagues were doing at the same time? For the greatness of their achievement is best assessed in the context of what their predecessors and their peers had accomplished. Happily, the later Ilkhanid period, say 1300 to 1350, was a golden age for Shah Nome illustration. Nine illustrated manuscripts of Ferdowsi's text, dated or dateable to roughly the first half of the 14th century, survive. Only four are dated to 1330, 1334, 1341 and 1352 and only one of those has a secure provenance, which is Shiraz in the period of Inju rule. The date of the great Mongol Shah Nome itself is not known, though the current scholarly consensus puts it between 1320 and 1335 and attributes it to Tabriz, the Mongol capital. But viewed as a whole, the nine surviving illustrated Shah Nome manuscripts, and they're probably only a fraction of what was produced, provide more than enough material for assessing how the art of illustrating the Shah Nome was practiced at this time. Several distinct manners are on display, but they do tend to hold fast to certain ground rules. It's worth laying out those ground rules in some detail. Thus, the dimensions of almost all these Shah Nomes fall within a fairly standard page format, which varies from 31 by 22 centimeters to 38 by 28 centimeters, and that's very, very much smaller than our manuscript. The fashion of the time dictated very wide margins on all three sides of the book, except the gutter, so that the framed area, which contains both painting and text, takes up less than half the page. What a waste! It's vital to stress this point, which is obscured by the fact that so many pages with paintings have been removed from their parent volume like these, and then had their margins brutally trimmed so that the original balance between empty space, blank space, text and painting is lost, and what's worse, seriously misrepresented. Margins are further trimmed when these paintings are reproduced by the designer. So what we see in most modern publications of these manuscripts and of this Shah Nome in particular is a travesty of what the actual page originally looked like. Those huge margins ensure that the reader's attention zeroes in on the framed area and what it encloses, but the fact that so much of the page itself is taken up by empty space and even this manuscript's been trimmed, which may seem unacceptably wasteful to the modern eye, automatically reduces the space available for text and image. And for the viewer interested above all in painting, perhaps like most of you, worse is to come because the paintings themselves tend to take no more than a quarter to a third of the area within the frame. With the text making up the rest. So although there's many exceptions, the text is the senior partner in this relationship. The favored format for the paintings in these Shah Nomes is oblong. So the action is strung along the frontal plane and indeed confined to it. The color scheme is limited with a strong emphasis on red and yellow, so far so good. And the more accomplished painters in this style don't seem to have regarded these rules as constricting. But they managed to achieve many felicities within these somewhat narrow borders. But there is a downside. These ground rules ensured a very marked miniaturization of the people in the painting and of their context. Hence the traditional term for Persian book painting in the West has been Persian miniature painting. The Lilliputian scale of both figures and landscape contrived to distance them from reality and accordingly diminished their dramatic and emotional impact. And the very limited picture space meant that there was room for only a few people in a painting. We can't have heaven crammed. This tiny size a major problem in itself when the painter attempted ambitious narratives or dramatic scenes. Created subsidiary problems of which two perhaps deserve special emphasis. The first is that tiny size militated against complex compositions. Keep it simple. So the layout is bare and as already noted favors the frontal plane with little attempt to exploit spatial subtleties. The second problem concerns a reduction in the painter's palette. There was simply not enough room to display a wide range of colors without attendant confusion. Perhaps the cost of certain pigments was also a constraining factor. At all events in these shaname manuscripts the range of color was limited with a particular emphasis on red and yellow. The constant repetition of these two colors had the cumulative effect of dulling the visual power of these images. Well you'll have seen where this argument is leading. It is that the most important innovation that the great Mongol shaname brought to Persian painting and not just to shanames was its hugely increased size of which much more tomorrow. But was it indeed an innovation? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence as the saying goes. None the less it is noticeable that there's no hard evidence for the existence of huge royal illustrated shanames before the late Ilhanid period. True there is a reference unearthed by Melikian Shovani to a Karakhanid ruler ordering an illustrated shaname in the late 12th century. But the reference reveals no detail about what this shaname looked like and the almost complete absence of surviving illustrated Persian manuscripts before the late Ilhanid period suggests that illustrated shanames were in fact new. A royal shaname moreover had to be instantly different from any other and instantly distinguishable as such. It called for more resources in both materials and manpower and more insidiously it called for more subtleties, more ideas. Perhaps the desire to make it big came first and was the initial non-negotiable requirement. Once accepted that meant that the space had to be filled, the bigger the picture, the bigger the challenge. The painters had to dig deep. A basic unfamiliarity for a task of this size and complexity was made still more challenging because in many cases there were no models for the painters to follow. At least no models that would guide them on this scale and complexity. In short, the first problem and almost an existential one is that this is the first surviving royal shaname and conceivably the first one ever. And that accordingly it set the bar at a height beyond the previous experience of the team members. Huge size had its attendant advantages. One was to encourage new approaches to Ferdowsy's long familiar text. Another was to trigger a host of innovations among them the development of pictorial space, you see it here. A hugely expanded range of emotional expression, you also see it here and exciting experiments in composition and format. These three innovations have a good claim to be the most important ones, though others such as a new kind of color coordination and contrast and a quite unprecedented fascination with the actual appearance of things also deserve attention. To put it briefly, much more was happening on the page. Early a work is no preparation for this tsunami of change. Now this evening I want to explore in more detail both some new approaches to the text and the three major technical innovations I've just listed. The new factor of huge size surely helped them to develop, but later and much smaller paintings successfully applied these lessons, especially the technical innovations. So this shaname bequeathed a substantial and largely unrecognized legacy to later Persian paintings. For they can be no doubt that from the 1360s onwards the best Persian painting consistently displayed greater subtlety of expression, more compositional know-how, improved brushwork, more attention to the interplay of text and image, a richer palette and a more nuanced appreciation of space than it had displayed before our manuscript. There was no looking back. Clearly that manuscript marked a turning point. To recap, these are the largest paintings of any known illustrated shaname. They take book painting to the very limits of the possible and the portable and perhaps beyond. One's reminded of the stiff-necked gothic builders who stubbornly rebuilt the dizzying height of the chancell tower of Beauvais Cathedral, even though it collapsed time and time and time again. The result is both astonishing and unique, for this is the closest that Persian painting gets to the kind of painting that we encounter in any Western art gallery. Whose size we take for granted. The artists exalted in this newfound scale. They employed it with ease, which is why these paintings lose none of their power when projected hugely onto a screen as I'm showing you now. The three technical innovations that I've just listed cover only part of the manuscript's achievement. Other issues open still wider perspectives. The $64,000 question is why a shaname on this gigantic scale was ordered at this particular moment and at this top level of patronage. Yes, the shaname clearly enjoyed a spur to popularity in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Yes, it was a vehicle for the expression of national sentiment and of a perennial Iranian identity. Indeed, the so-called small shanames express both of these trends very successfully. But the great Mongol shaname does much more. It is a thing apart. Like so many supreme masterpieces, it works on several levels simultaneously. To do so, it employs a wide range of approaches, many of them new. And it's no easy task to rank their relative importance at the time that this project was being planned, nor whether the priorities changed as the project gathered momentum. Some of these approaches had to do with the text. Others concerned the painter's craft. These two general categories each deserve separate detailed consideration. What of the approaches that had to do with the text itself? One key aspect, the brainchild of the brilliant Abulala Sudavar, was the lofty aim to highlight possible connections between the shaname text and the series of episodes from the history of the Mongol ruling house over the previous century. Weddings, rebellions, conspiracies, executions, poisonings, funerals and shooting waterfowl, poisoning and shooting waterfowl on the board. This was, of course, an extremely artificial undertaking. How could an 11th century text itself an attempt to mythologize, transfigure and reimagine history have anything at all to do with actual events that occurred two centuries later? So, in a sense, it was an impudent hijack. Since the text itself was unalterable, it was up to the painters to find pictorial ways of integrating and indeed politicizing that text with secondary meanings of Mongol import that were never, of course, in Firdosi's mind, essentially creating a visual subplot. The entire exercise was based on illusion rather than assertion. Clues were artfully scattered throughout the images, like the imperial Chinese robe worn by Rustam at his death or the selective use of elite Mongol hats at times of political crisis such as the death of the heir apparent. But there was a good chance that they would be picked up by alert minds for key events in the recent history of the Mongol ruling house would have been freshened the minds of the Mongol and Persian elite who viewed this manuscript always intended to do so. The demand for this innovative exercise came from above. It could scarcely have been generated by the painters. It called for imagination, ingenuity and literary erudition to dream up these connections in the first place and then to make them work. This was not a job for the Mongol elite but for Persian officials who from childhood knew the sharname backwards. And the painters themselves had much more to do than find ways to flesh out these Mongol connections in pictorial form. It fell to them to develop a whole new vision of their dosis text, one that made it relevant to their own time and to their own people so that the familiar stories could take on new life and meaning. Facing that awesome challenge placed a heavy weight of responsibility on their shoulders. For these were not mere jobbing artists in the pay of the court, they were Persians with a patriotic duty to celebrate the national epic after a century of alien rule. And they were working in the top atelier in the land with access to all the facilities associated with it and with the riches of Iran's finest libraries readily at hand to inspire their imaginations. What was now required was to achieve at the very least multiple new insights into the text as distinct from following already established formulae and funerary scenes like this are a good example. Another example is the covert declaration of the ideals of Sufi brotherhood and chivalry, Javan Mairdi, by the distinctive sashes worn by many a courtier in these images. After a century or so of Mongol rule, the great Mongol Sharname spearheaded the long delayed Iranian response to the appalling psychic trauma inflicted by the Mongol invasions and the deep silence that followed. It celebrates in visual forms of unprecedented power and emotional intensity that same exalted perennial sense of Iranian identity, pride and destiny that Ferdowsi himself celebrates in his immortal lines. It became a vehicle for proclaiming what made Iran unique despite military defeat, despite a century of subordination and oppression under alien rule. The sheer size and splendor of this manuscript meant that Persian culture itself could express rebellion when armed insurrection was not an option. It's tragic that the full intended impact of this bold enterprise was never achieved, for political chaos ensured that the project was abandoned well before it had reached even the halfway mark. Finally, there is the most fundamental approach of all to be considered, the interplay between word and image. The new perspectives, opened by the greatly increased scale and range of color in this sharname, invited indeed almost required painters to load their images with extra content. That meant closer attention to the text, including not just a pictorial equivalent of the text, but a pictorial commentary on it. Sometimes this was not done via Ferdowsi's words, but by symbols. A few examples will clarify this. In medieval Persian poetry, the cat often serves as an emblem of treachery. So as Baki Ki receives a fatal dagger thrust from his servant, a cat gambles playfully on the floor. And as the Shah's paramour, Gulnar, sports with a stable boy in bed, a cat nestles beneath the mattress, staring out at us unblinkingly. Sometimes on the other hand, the impact of the text itself generates an unexpected pictorial echo. The dragon killed by Bahram Ghur inspires a lengthy description by Ferdowsi, actually mirrored by the slow uncoiling of its tail across the entire diagonal length of the picture. Similarly, one may note the expert exploitation of all the space as the wall against the savages of Gog and Magog makes snakes zigzag fashion to and fro across the upper half of the painting, whose emphasis on sheer length, blackness and fire accurately evokes Ferdowsi's text. Funeral scenes in particular seem to have inspired the painters in unpredictable ways to go beyond the text in their independent visual commentary. Sometimes they used the natural world for this purpose as in the brutally broken shrub snapped off short in full bloom that dominates the foreground playing as the aged Rustam kills the young prince Esfandiar. In the very next image, and by the way, note how often these images cross reference each other, three cranes fly in a sky of midnight blue high over the coffin of Esfandiar. In Chinese culture cranes denote longevity, but here one of them flies in the opposite direction to the others, signalling a rupture in the natural order, namely a young life cut short in its prime. And sometimes the painters ignored the text altogether to create an entirely different context. Ferdowsi describes the coffins of Rustam and Savare passed from shoulder to shoulder by the mourners that throng the roadside. But astonishingly enough, the painter depicts none of these bystanders at all. Instead, we see a solemn procession of barefoot, bareheaded, tonsured, black-robed Dominican monks swinging incense burners as they pace along. And the lamentation over Alexander the Great Esfandiar is even further removed from Ferdowsi's text, which describes a vast, open air concourse of mourners encircling the coffin on the Babylonian plain. Instead of evoking this extensive panorama, the painter has imagined a scene that is much more intimate, intense and unmediated. Now the focus is less on the face than on an entire inventory of gesture within an extravagantly opulent setting. So much for the approaches that concern the text itself. I now turn to those approaches that concern the painter's craft and the rest of this lecture will focus on what could be seen as the three most important of them. The first and perhaps the most far reaching of these innovative approaches is the development of pictorial space. Some brief comparisons with earlier work will highlight the radical changes that this manuscript brought. Earlier battle scenes, for example, were restricted to the frontal plane and comprised either warriors strung out in echelon or colliding clumps of mast cavalry with only the central figures directly involved in combat. Now, wave after wave of warriors crash across the page, filling it from top to bottom. Now, the enthroned monarch is not flanked by motionless rows of bland dummies, but interacts with courtiers whose individuality extends from face to dress to pose. Such variations forbid the eye to glide over them. Instead, they arrest the viewer's gaze. Moreover, the architectural backdrop never stays the same. External action does not take place in a bleak tundra fitfully enlivened by a jumbled pile of rocks and a grotesque potted plant or two. As in earlier painting, but in a living landscape whose atmosphere changes from one painting to the next. Each monster slaying, for example, involves a different habitat from primeval forest to plunging ravines. It is quite simply extra space that allows, indeed, triggers this traumatic enrichment of the painter's visual language. Putting more into the picture dictated, finding a place for it within the frame. For scenes set in the open air and involving some kind of landscape, these painters could now draw on their limited acquaintance with Chinese painting and incorporate such alien features as high horizon, contour lines and successive overlapping mountain peaks to put across the idea of depth. Interiors scenes do not manage perspective equally well as one can see from the recurrent tendency to break up space into discrete blocks marked in the vertical plane by doors, niches, arches, windows or shutters and then populated with people. Rows of crenellations demarcate space along the horizontal plane. Occasionally, there is some degree of stepping to enhance majesty or, in this case, other wordliness as well. Or to underscore a dangerous exploit. Some of these ideas may seem rather obvious and mechanical, but they are a major improvement on what meant before when people are shoehorned into a linear two-story grid that flouts any notion of architectural reality. The mathematical or optical calculation of perspective was an idea foreign to these artists. It's the people that matter and they are often too big in relation to the rest of the picture. This indicates that there was no consistent attitude to the representation of pictorial space and this is why there is so often a striking mismatch between people and their setting. But now, there was enough room to introduce a subplot. Thus, Bahram Ghur and the peasants and their cow is neatly divided into a standard enthronement above and a genre scene below. Or the morning fairy dune above is contrasted with the soldier's servants below setting fire to the royal garden. The compartmentalization of space is exploited to distinguish those who matter more such as the king and his courtiers from those who matter less such as the women banished to the upper stories of the palace and overtly eavesdropping on the action. But other contrivances indicate an increased awareness of pictorial space and of the need to create a credible environment for the action. Figures overlap, curtains lead the eye across the painting. Tables, footstools, thrones are shown as an angle that forces the viewer to acknowledge depth. While screens in front of the key figure illusionistically push him further back to give him extra space. Doors and doorways are used to suggest the space behind them. The savage guillotining of figures or animals entering or leaving the picture space sometimes on both sides at once tells us that the action continues out of sight and is part of a still greater space. So what we're seeing is a snapshot as it were from a moving film. This is particularly true of the battle scenes. Figures with their backs turned in repoussual fashion served to lure us right into the picture. Among the methods used to highlight, contrast or separate the components of a composition are trees and adjoining curved or circular spaces look at the top one within the frame and sometimes the artists spring a surprise. Thus the scene depicting Bahram Ghur at the Hunt opens up space by successive diagonal coulisses and then a diagonal in yet another direction as his prey scatters in panic. Now the extra space provided by the huge increase in the surface area of the painting permitted far more people to be depicted and thus led to a range of experiments in depicting crowds. Sometimes they are used as blocks carefully spaced and positioned for best effect. The crowd of men massed close to the char who breaks his promise to abdicate leaving his son fatally bereft of support offers a mute commentary on time serving courtiers. The significant distance that opens up between the bold monarch and his timid entourage crowded behind him in fear and awe watching from a safe distance as he grapples with a monster has a satirical twist. Conversely the gang of workmen engaged in various tasks as they build the wall against the savages of the step radiate team spirit and a proper pride in their work. Sometimes crowds served by means of sheer mass to underline naked power which can also be done by contrasting the crowd below with a monarch above in splendid isolation or swirling movement evokes chaos and uncertainty as courtiers mill around aimlessly. When they are formally marshaled in rows in serried rows flanking an enthroned char depicted frontally they represent the order and discipline of a well run state. The kneeling rows of Zoroastrian priests facing the isolated figure of the enthroned char Manuchir convey the subordination of church by state. Freely moving cavalry tear upon tear in set military formation contrast with the panic of the fleeing enemy each man intent only on saving his own skin. In successive funerary scenes the emphasis shifts from the rendering of individual emotion with the mourners scattered to the forewinds to a grave unity of purpose as the mourners march and step. Thus crowds have multiple functions in this manuscript and a new appreciation of the potential of sheer space is integral to that achievement. The second major innovation is a hugely expanded range of emotional expression. Earlier Ilhanid painting had not gone far in this direction. Crowd scenes as shown above lent themselves to depicting emotion thus the varied impact of grief on individuals is brought home by the way that they crouch in huddled groups or take the men carrying the coffins of Rustam and Zavare. Grief has etched deep grooves into their cheeks. Their eyebrows are diagonal slashes, their eyes roomy. These signposts of sorrow on the human face are something as new in Persian painting as they were in Giotto's Italy. Body language is closely observed and constantly varied including as it does interlocking gazes, outflung arms, heads bared in grief and strong contraposto to indicate determination. Gesture is still more lavishly employed as a powerful vehicle for expressing feelings, hands outstretched in pleading or reproof, clenched on a window still in excitement, tearing the hair or beard in grief, flying to the mouth in dismay when a murderer's stratagem is revealed, invoking protection against the evil eye, defiantly grasping a belt or with fingers splayed in shock are a few examples among many. A hunched back or a bowed head is enough to indicate despair. There's no sense here of the mechanical repetition of a few familiar gestures such as the raised hand for speech, the finger in the mouth to express surprise and the crossed arms on the chest or the hand on the heart to indicate sincerity and loyalty or poses which custom has staled. Instead the many fresh ways whereby these painters render emotion keep the viewer engaged in the action and now their range extends at long last to the face as a mirror of emotion. هنس bottom left the stricken look of the Shah as he takes in the depth of his servants self sacrifice as he offers his own severed testicles in a little bag. هنس the pensive reflection of Bahram Ghur after he has dispatched the wolf monster calm of mind all passion spent. His fierce concentration as he loses his last arrow the vacant expression of the peasant who does not recognize the king who has taken refuge in his hut or the berserker bloodlust of Farrah Maris as he wields his mace for a killer blow. And the repertoire of these painters extends far beyond gesture. Panic comes off the page via helter skelter pelmel flight. Fireworks in the sky parallel vicious slaughter below. A grisly pradella of corpses body parts and the discarded impediment or a battle brings home the costs and chaos of war. And even natural features and landscapes are brought into play. Budding flowers surround Iskandar as he sits enthroned. A portent of his glorious reign. Conversely trees serve as agents of menace metaphors of pain and even take part in the action crushing the villain. Or they suggest romance via luscious crimson blossoms. Landscapes evoke at will an exotic paradise in sun drenched Hindustan or gloom and danger. The deliberate enlargement of key figures vis-à-vis others including even their horses spotlights their importance and is thus a vehicle of expression. A radical approach to colour coordination and contrast allows these artists to set darkness against light and to employ colour to spotlight key figures. One may note too how successive scenes of funerals privilege in turn white, black and blue. Isolation is sometimes exploited for powerful emotional effect whether to evoke pity for a hero facing execution or a prince wronged by his father or to underscore the courage of Alexander facing challenges which his followers shirk. The third area of innovation concerns composition and format. Once again, size is perhaps the crucial factor that permitted a radical rethinking of how to put a painting together and encouraged a new complexity of design. Issues of mass, perspective, symmetry, balance and reciprocity now come to the fore. These painters repeatedly exploit landscape, skyscape and cloudscape as a way of ringing the changes on familiar compositions and here the sheer range of experiment is especially impressive and exciting. The sequence of enthronements and of battle scenes is internally so different from each other that the risk of monotony is slight. Each genre is bunched in a particular area of the text so that the repeated iterations follow each other in short succession, a case of variations on the theme. This suggests some degree of overall control, an awareness of the need to vary the diet as one leaves through the book. Hence, no theme is permitted to dominate for long. Orchestrating the placing of figures calls for an acute and indeed intuitive sense of interval and may resonate with meaning. Thus, the frozen tableau as the aged xal embraces the youthful bahmon witnessed by a few strategically placed onlookers, marks the still centre of a turning world, the last chance of peace before war breaks out and catastrophe strikes. Affronted groupings focus on what lies between them and there are still more dramatic confrontations galore, ranging from two warriors in single combat to one person against two or three or many more, or between a shah and his faithful servant. And I mentioned earlier the telling gap between a bold leader and his timid retinue. A gaze may serve as the dramatic link. Court ladies may be so curious to see what's going on that they put their own safety at risk as they crane over a balcony and they can also be a witness to murder enthroned kings, lean forward to speak to a subject or draw back in modesty when receiving the foot kiss. Here the skewed pose of the shah adds extra compositional interest. Scenes which depict or presage violent death include the fallen iraj, trapped between his two brothers, towering over him and wielding weapons. The kneeling nodar, trapped between executioner and a fraziab with a curved blade of the sword that will behead him, closing off the space above him, or aardavan hemmed in by brutal soldiers while his executioner turns his back on the viewer. Architecture is used as a sezura, highlighting private secrecy versus public gossip, or to frame private grief. A bitter mother-daughter conflict is set within an architectural frame from which the hapless maid is largely excluded. Novel spatial devices catch the eye, such as a diagonal division of the picture space with one half overcrowded while the other remains largely empty. Or an empty central V pits Faridun disguised as a dragon against his sons thereby emphasizing the starkness of the challenge each has to face. Two-tier or even three-tier compositions underline the power of the battle scenes and the intensity of grief. Stepping is used for emphasis while framing methods that enliven a standard enthronement include inquisitive ladies and clustered courtiers below. The artists are constantly ringing the changes on such tools of emphasis, from capitals to the swords that form a diagonal over the shah's head while spears frame the fight to the death of Alexander and the Indian Raja. Inscription bans proclaiming power, power, power flank enthroned monarchs, many of whom have a halo to set them apart or sit under an arch, which on one occasion is of such spectacular size that it recalls the fabled arch of Khosrow. Open windows are an apt setting for the royal face and these artists also use parted curtains, a favoured and time-honoured motif in several cultures to focus attention on the monarch, both alive and dead. Nature itself in the form of flanking trees also plays its part. And so to conclude, trying to define what makes this manuscript a masterpiece is like trying to pour a gallon into a pint pot. These were artists well ahead of their time and also working at the extreme limits of the possible in book painting. They that overstressed the production process. They tried to do too much. Their imaginations ran ahead of their technical capacity, but to paint on a grander scale on canvas or wood was simply not an option for them. So to mourn over what might have been, to yearn for the road not travelled is fruitless. It was a sure instinct that led later artists to reduce not only the scale but also the register of their work and to distance it from reality in multiple ways. But there were also downsides to such decisions. It's hard to strike a heroic pose with a painting whose scale is that of a miniature. And the great Mongol Shahnawi is emphatically not an example of Persian miniature painting. It's too sprawling, untamed and raw for that. It is not decorous. Its execution is not polished. But its power and majesty are never compromised by the urge to decorate. Its scenes are not presented at one remove from life. They grab us by the throat. It speaks with many voices. By turn it whispers, declaims and thunders. These paintings weep, they scream, they roar. This was the first and last illustrated Shahnawi to do that. And it remains a wonder beyond words. Thank you.