Rulers, patrons and the artist's work

Brief

This lesson asks you to identify and analyse social, political and economic factors that affect the creation of visual and media arts and the community of artists. The museum links a record of a painter who worked under successive patrons; your class adds other places and other arts. ¹

Who pays, who rules, who makes?

Look at the expectation: it asks which factors shape the making of art. For one record, list who ruled, who paid or appointed, and what the artist or building did next. Then ask what you cannot tell from the record.

Go deeper

Behzad was orphaned as a youth, and he was reared and trained by Mirak Naqqash, the painter-calligrapher who directed the Timurid royal library ² ³. A decree of the sultan in 1486 made him head of the royal ateliers in Herat, succeeding Mirak ³. Encyclopaedia Iranica says the surest anchor of his hand is a book: the illustrations of Sa'di's Bustan of 893/1488, with his signatures worked inconspicuously into architectural inscriptions ².

Why they did it

The records preserve no sentence in which Behzad says why he painted as he did. They show who stood behind him. He worked first under Mir Ali-Shir Nava'i and then under Sultan Husayn Bayqara ³. His Sufi subjects, the record says, are the commissions of courts and the texts of poets, not attestations of the painter himself ³.

Often misunderstood

A superlative is easy to repeat. Iranica cautions that in his own century Behzad was regarded as only one of several skilled painters of the Herat circle, and that the verdict that sets him above them is a Safavid-age judgement, repeated in the decree that compares his brush to Mani's ². The record adds that no author gives a coherent biography of him, and even his birth date is unknown ².

Think about it

A famous decree of Shah Ismail appoints Behzad in 928/1522, but Iranica questions the dating of the document it rests on, and the Safavid authors name Shah Tahmasp, not Ismail, as his employer ² ³. Which would you trust more to say who employed him, the decree or the authors, and what would you check first?

Into the museum

Kamal ud-Din Behzad: the Herat years, the move to Tabriz, and the points on which the sources disagree.
Pouncing in Persian painting: the record names a scene by Bihzad, as Titley spells the name, of about 1493 that was faithfully copied in the sixteenth century.

Try this

Read Kamal ud-Din Behzad. Write one sentence naming a ruler and one naming what changed when the rule changed.