Space-Forms in the Work of the Baghdād Maqāmāt Illustrators, 1225–58

Abstract

While acknowledging the complexity of fourteenth-century Persian painting, it would be fair to state that one of the things that makes the painting of 1400 so visibly and obviously different from that of 1300 is the introduction in the course of that century of a number of technical developments which increased, quite dramatically, the area of picture-space available to the artist. Undoubtedly the most important of these was ‘the development of the “high horizon” technique, whereby the ground is seen, as it were, from above so that the figures can be spaced out in various planes without interfering with one another, thus allowing the composition to be conceived on a larger scale with the corresponding diminution in scale of the human figures in proportion to the whole’. To this one might add the expansion of the composition beyond the confines of the frame in a manner more ambitious than hitherto, and, in the early part of the fifteenth century, the appearance of the double-page miniature which is perhaps the logical conclusion of these developments.

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