A sign of the end time: 'The Monastery', Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi H.2153 f.131b

Journal article

Studies of visual culture in the Persian-speaking world of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries frequently discuss the literary contexts in which painting was often produced, yet scant attention has been paid to understanding how the visual can engage with the verbal beyond representing a sequential narrative. Arguing that paintings and literary texts are autonomous, yet can engage with similar ideas, this article focuses on a painting in the album TSMK H.2153 that is generally perceived to lie outside the frameworks of narrative poetry: ‘The Monastery’ (f.131b). The article investigates how the painting employs techniques of representation similar to those used in lyric and panegyric poetry, to connect individual motifs and thereby explore ideas. An engagement with the continuities between literary and visual cultures reveals a chronogram, giving the year in which ‘The Monastery’ was produced, and allows us to understand how it constructs a vision of unorthodox kingship.

Authors: White, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Journal: Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
• Volume: 27
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 1-30
• Publication date: 2016-10-01
• Acceptance date: 2016-08-10
• DOI: 10.1017/S1356186316000444
• EISSN: 1474-0591
• ISSN: 1356-1863