 Hi everyone, welcome to Barns Takeout. My name is Kaelen Jewel. I'm a senior instructor in adult education at the Barnes Foundation and I wanted to spend a few minutes with you talking about a really interesting manuscript illumination that is on display in Gallery 16 at the Barnes, which we're looking at right here. We're looking at the east wall. It's one of the busier rooms in the collection. There are works of art from ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient Rome. There's jewelry from Native American to Native American Southwest. There are manuscripts pages from medieval Western Europe and from medieval Persia. And that's what I wanted to talk about today and specifically this one right here. But there is another one here and another one on the other side that were all made in the same workshop. They probably were made for the same book. As far as we can tell, we think that they come from the same book. And the book was called the Shanama, which was a medieval epic poem written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi. And it translates to the book of the king. And this was a very long poem that described the ancient kings of Iran, the heroic kings of Iran, and the mythological and legendary kings of Iran, which is what we have on display in the manuscript pages of the Barnes. So we see one here and you can see that they have a similar dimension. So let's go to the other side passing by other cultures, other time periods, and then over to these two here. You can see that these are very complicated scenes. They're outdoors, but there are a lot of figures, a lot of animals. They're very, very busy and they're battle scenes. So let's look at this one more closely. So here it is. Again, this is one of the three that were from the book called the Shanama. And the representation that we have here is a very specific moment in the story of the Shanama. It comes from one of the legendary stories of the heroic king Rufstang, who we have depicted here wearing a tiger skin coat and an animal, like a large cat's head on his helmet. And he is engaging in battle with a foe on the other side named Ashkaba. And this is the moment in the Shanama just before Rufstang kills both horse and rider of his enemy. It's set within a very kind of mysterious sort of outdoor setting. I mean, it's a rocky outcrop. It looks like maybe it's mountains, right? So we've got this mountain, this pinkish mountain in the foreground that acts as a backdrop for Ashkaba and Rufstang. We've got some purple rocks in the foreground. We've got this tree kind of jutting into the space. We've got some animals populating the scene that are just kind of hanging out here. We've got this deer like creature at the bottom. And then we've got all of these plants that sort of populate the hillside or this mountain craggy mountain scape. In the background, so behind the mountain that we see Rufstang and Ashkaba fighting against, we see a collection of soldiers, some on horseback, some carrying standards and flags, some carrying musical instruments and blowing horns. And then we have another mountain scape in the background that acts as a backdrop and a screen that we see some other figures standing behind. So it's an interesting representation of space here. We've got some stylized clouds here, very interesting shapes. And you see that some of these figures are holding onto spears and you can see that the spears extend over the edges, over the borders of this manuscript. These manuscript pages, when they were detached from their original manuscript, were cut out and then applied to a larger piece of paper that has gold collects on it. So this larger piece of paper that we have here is from that is not original to the manuscript. So it's this portion in the middle here, which has also a gold flecked pattern on it. But if we look at it closely, you can see that the gold flecking is a little bit different than we have in the outer border. So this was made in the mid 16th century and it was made in the Iranian city of Shiraz. Let's look at the map. So this is where Shiraz is located in this portion of Western Iran. Shiraz was the capital of the Farse province. Today it is the capital of the Farse province in Iran, modern-day Iran. And it was a center of production of illuminated manuscripts in the 16th century. The capital of the region at the time was Tabriz, which is located just about up here. And this was during the ruling dynasty of the Sabbathids. The Sabbathids were in charge of and in control of, I should say, of this portion really of what corresponds to much of modern-day Iran. And they were the political rivals to the Ottoman Turks who were located primarily in what is modern-day Turkey. And their capital was at Istanbul. And so these two territories, these two dynasties, really these two empires, the Ottoman Empire and the Sabbathid Empire, were vying for power. They were constantly, not constantly, but very often at battle. And in the mid-16th century, this was a period of pretty intense conflict between the Ottomans and the Sabbathids. So that's sort of the historical backdrop for the production of these types of manuscripts, which become, they are popular throughout Persian history, beginning in the 10th, 11th century, when the poet Ferdowsi first composed the Shanema. And then in the mid-16th century, they kind of ramp up again in production. And Shiraz was a place of what is often referred to by scholars as a place of commercial production for these manuscripts. So these were not made. This manuscript that we are looking at that we have at the barn was not made for a royal audience, but it was meant to imitate the styles or be in the style of those royal manuscripts made for the Sabbathid Shah, the king, in the capital of Tabriz. So let's look at one of those royal manuscripts of the same scene. So this is one that's at the Met in New York, and it's an image, again, of Rustam and Ashabas. This comes from the 16th century, so this is probably a little bit earlier, maybe 20 or 30 years earlier, of the the Shanema of Shah-Tazma. And if we look at this in more detail, we can see a similar configuration of figures. So we have Rustam here, we have Ashabas here. This is the moment after Rustam has actually killed Ashabas' horse. You can see the arrow here, and they are engaging in a one-on-one battle set against, in this case, a green mountain highlighted with some purple. And behind the mountain you have, again, these groups of soldiers on horseback carrying flags, carrying musical instruments and horns, and these interesting swirl-like clouds that we see in our example of the barns. There's another one that's at the Khalidu Museum of Art. This one was made in Shiraz, so this is not a royal example. This is one of those more commercially produced examples that were made for various wealthy patrons in commercial centers and busy cities like Shiraz. And so here we can see, again, Rustam with his tiger coat. In this case, he has just killed Ashabas, and there is yet another one, another one of these Shirazi manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Again, Rustam wearing his tiger coat and he is getting ready to attack Ashabas. So that's sort of the backdrop for the kind of context in which our example at the barns was created. But these types of manuscripts, while they were in a Persian context, meant to serve as images connecting various parts of legendary and historical figures to modern 16th century figures, like the modern Shahs in the 16th century Sabbath of court. They also, these manuscripts were used as gifts given to diplomatic gifts given to the Ottoman court. And so the royal examples of these made into breeze were often sent to the Ottoman court in Istanbul and the ones that were made in Shiraz were made for local patrons. But all of these manuscripts, and there are so many of them that were produced and there are so many that survive in various contexts around the world, were all served, have served in more recent years, in more recent centuries, as artistic inspiration for modern artists like Amir Matisse. And specifically it's the way that the landscapes are rendered, the flat kind of cut out like landscapes of these hill sides, the stacked nature of space that we see in all of the examples, are one of the things that inspired artists like European artists like Matisse, who was a collector of these Persian manuscripts. And here we have Gallery 19 at the barns, a painting that was painted by Matisse in 1917 called The Music Lessons. And it has a really interesting sense of space, it's very flat, it has no horizon line, right, he doesn't give us any horizon line, instead we have this very vertical sense of space represented and this this emphatic flatness. The piano is tipped forward so that we can see what's on it, for example, and so forth. If we go into another gallery at the barns, so this is gallery number 10 downstairs, which has a collection of really great paintings by a lot of artists, but some really wonderful ones by Matisse and really instructive ones. So we've got this very flat Matisse here, there's no sense of modeling or depth in that figure. There are also these three paintings which were painted in Nice in the 1920s. We've got a landscape here on the left by Matisse painted 1906, and then we've got a 1920s landscape here of two women against a hillside. And that sense of the hillside kind of being flatly the perspective being much flatter than we see in his earlier 1906 landscape is showing us the impact that Matisse's interest on Persian manuscripts had on his art production throughout his career. So it's interesting when we are in gallery number 16 at the barns and we are encountering these works from all over the world that have their very specific historical context like the Shanama manuscript pages that they served as not just diplomatic gift between various wealthy patrons or various ruling dynasties and imperial courts, but that they also served as inspiration for modern artists. So when you come to the barns, be sure to check them out. And for those of you who might be interested in learning more about the historical context of these types of manuscripts and of Islamic art in general from the medieval period, I would encourage you to sign up for my class which will begin on April 8th called the Arts of Medieval Islam. So thanks for joining me today. And I hope to see you in class or in the gallery. Take care. Bye bye. Thanks for watching and for your support of the Barnes Foundation.