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Bathing Maidens Observed by the Master of the Garden, illustrated folio from a manuscript of the Haft Paykar of Nizami

This small painting has been carefully, if unfortunately, cut from a manuscript page, preserving the pictorial elements that extended beyond the gold ruling. The opposite side of the folio is abraded, but partially preserves four columns of text written in nineteen lines of nasta’liq script. The folio’s text and painting are from the Haft Paykar (The Seven Beauties) section of the Khamsa (Quintet) by the Persian poet Nizami. The painting appears to conflate two moments in a story recounted by the Princess of the Seventh Clime on Friday to entertain Bahram Gur (J. S. Meisami, The Haft Paykar, Oxford, 1995, pp 217-33). In the tale, a young man hears the sound of music and singing emanating from his own garden. Because he does not have the key to the garden gate, he enters through a breach in the wall to find five maidens bathing in his pool. When the maidens see him, they attack and imprison him. Upon learning that he is the master of the garden, they apologize and, as compensation, allow him to observe them bathing in a pool of milk, with the understanding that he will choose the maiden he finds most desirable. In the painting we see the half-clad maidens bathing in a hexagonal pool, the once silvery contents of which have now tarnished to black. One maiden tugs at the robe of the young master who has discovered them bathing. In what seems to be a later moment in the tale, the young master looks out at the maidens from a window in a pavilion. This illustrated folio almost certainly belongs to a manuscript now in the Bryn Mawr College Library, based on the size of the text box, number of lines and columns on each page, and illustrative style. An article by Yael Rice (Muqarnas vol. 28, 2011, pp. 265-281) introduces the manuscript, a copy of the Khamsa of Nizami. It is incomplete but has twenty-four paintings and two illuminated chapter headings. Its text lacks two thirds of the Haft Paykar and the Iskandarnama. The Harvard folio would be placed somewhere after the last miniature on fol. 158v of the Bryn Mawr Khamsa. Rice suggests that the fragmentation of the text may have happened when the manuscript was given its present nineteenth-century lacquer binding. On fol. 111a the colophon for the Layla va Majnun section gives the name of the calligrapher Hasan al-Hafiz who had also worked on a 1412-13 Anthology (Gulbenkian Museum, Ms. L.A. 158) dedicated to Iskandar Sultan (d. 1415), the Timurid prince who held governorships of Yazd (1405-7), Shiraz (1409-12), and Isfahan (1412-14). The small size of the Bryn Mawr Khamsa also compares well with five other illustrated manuscripts from Shiraz attributed to the patronage of Iskandar Sultan. However on fol. 3a an illuminated ex libris gives the name of Ibrahim Sultan. Rice suggests two hypotheses: The Khamsa may have been produced for Iskandar Sultan or for another princely patron in the Fars region between 1405 and 1414 and when his cousin Ibrahim Sultan (d. 1435) assumed the governorship of Fars, around 1414-15 an ex libris with his name was appended to the manuscript. Or the manuscript may have been produced at the court of Ibrahim Sultan during the few years of his governorship in Shiraz when the artists who worked for Iskandar Sultan were still active. In both cases the Bryn Mawr Khamsa poses questions on the qualitative differences between its paintings and those in other royal manuscripts produced in Fars in the early 15th century.

c. 1410

Manuscripts

Opaque watercolor and gold on paper

8.5 x 5.2 cm (3 3/8 x 2 1/16 in.)

Harvard Art Museums