Persian Miniature

Persian Miniature is an art movement. The gallery holds 47 works in this movement, including works by Reza `Abbasi, 'Aliquli Jabbadar and Sadiqi Beg. Browse Persian Miniature paintings, portraits, pictures and artworks from the world's public-domain museum collections.

Persian miniature painting is the tradition of small, intricately detailed images that illustrated manuscripts and albums across the Iranian world from the thirteenth century onward. Its earliest great flowering came under the Mongol Ilkhanate (1256–1335), whose Tabriz scriptorium absorbed Chinese motifs—dragons, swirling clouds, jagged rock formations—brought west along the Mongol trade routes. The illustrated copies of Rashid al-Din's Jami al-tavarikh ("Compendium of Chronicles"), produced around 1314, count among the most important surviving examples of Ilkhanid art and the largest body of early Persian miniatures; the catalogue's Chingiz-nama page depicting the siege of Arbela belongs to this world-history tradition.

The classic style crystallised in the fifteenth century under the Timurids, when royal ateliers at Herat and Samarkand perfected the art of the illustrated book. Painters worked in opaque watercolour and gold on paper, building luminous, jewel-toned scenes governed by a high viewpoint, flattened space, and an almost obsessive ornamental precision rather than European-style perspective. The supreme master of this period was Kamal al-Din Behzad (c. 1455–1535), who headed the Herat academy from 1486 under Sultan Husayn Bayqara and brought new naturalism of gesture and crowd composition to the form.

Under the Safavids (1501–1736) the tradition reached its zenith at the Tabriz court. The Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, with 258 paintings across 759 folios, is the most lavishly illustrated copy of Firdausi's epic ever made; its director Sultan Muhammad fused the Herat, Shiraz, and Tabriz manners, as in his celebrated "Court of Gayumars." The catalogue's Shah-nama leaves—Rustam taking aim at Ashkabus, Bijan slaying the boars of Irman—descend directly from this epic-illustration culture, as do the folios from Jami's Panj Ganj ("Five Treasures").

As Tahmasp's enthusiasm waned and the atelier dispersed around mid-century, the art shifted toward single-figure album drawings. Reza Abbasi (c. 1565–1635), working for Shah Abbas I in Isfahan, became the last great master, famed for sensuous studies of languid youths and lovers such as the collection's "The Lovers." Persian masters who migrated to India seeded the closely related Mughal painting tradition, ensuring the style's reach far beyond Iran.