How Land Came into the Picture: Rendering History in the Fourteenth-Century Jami al-Tawarikh.

Abstract

The manuscripts from the Ilkhanate (1258-1370), the Iranian part of the Mongol Empire, contain paintings that evoke an illusion of three-dimensional space and passage of time for the first time in the Islamic world. They also show signs of modeling, wash, and calligraphic strokes and include scrolling clouds, rolling hills, and sinuous tree trunks, techniques and motifs that were absent in pre-Ilkhanid Islamic arts and that seem to originate in Chinese landscape paintings. This new way of rendering land was one of the most significant stylistic changes that occurred in the Ilkhanid paintings. The dissertation focuses on the representations of nature in the Jami al-Tawarikh ("Compendium of Chronicles" 1306-7), the world history written by vizier Rashid al-Din. It considers an epistemological analogy between the additive pictorial space in the Jami al-Tawarikh paintings and the layered and interpolated historical spaces in the text of the Jami al-Tawarikh. Rashid al-Din centers the Islamic world on the Ilkhanid land space, which is contrastingly called "a far distant corner" in the Yuan Shi. The political dialectic between center and periphery may have been visualized in some of the Jami al-Tawarikh paintings, in which the representations of nature dominate the center while the protagonists are relegated to the sides. In the Jami al-Tawarikh paintings, the visual elements seem to move at various velocities; while some clouds curl tightly, hills may move up and down at a lower frequency, and the figures may seem rooted firmly on the ground. These movements evoke a sense of differently-paced times, not unlike the scientist Nasir al-Din al-Tusi's (1201-1274) theorization of motion and time in the treatise, Tadhkira fi ‘ilm al-hay’a ("A Memoir on the Science of Astronomy"), that they are perceived quantities that depend on the reference point of the observer. The stylistic changes in the Ilkhanid paintings were so drastic that it is considered that the tradition of Persian painting began in the Ilkhanid period. The renditions of land in the Jami al-Tawarikh paintings may have newly provided a visual language parallel and correlative to the verbal one as a means of conceptualizing space, time, and memory.