Pouncing in Persian painting

Pouncing was a way of copying a miniature or part of a composition: transparent deerskin was laid over the original and its outline traced, the line closely pricked with a fine needle, then the pricked skin laid on the paper and charcoal dabbed on it from a mesh bag, penetrating the holes to leave a guiding outline. ¹ An example is a horseman and lion traced on skin in an album in the Topkapı Palace Museum Library (Hazine 2153). ¹

Norah Titley notes that compositions could be assembled from pounced details and figures taken from various manuscripts at the copier's whim, so that styles of different schools and periods may occur in one late sixteenth-century manuscript. ¹ The half-rearing horse with its rider poised with spear, bow or sword occurs in all periods of Persian painting, as in a battle scene by Bihzad of about 1493 faithfully copied in the sixteenth century. ¹

Copies were also made by pricking round groups of figures in a manuscript painting itself, as was done to the murder of Siyavush in the Tabriz Shahnama of 1536 (Add. 15531), where the bystanders, not the main characters, were pricked. ² Mughal artists used pouncing too, and stencils were widely used for border designs in Iran, India and Turkey. ² For Titley, repetition by pounces and sketches lets one trace a continuous chain from Baghdad in 1396 to Herat in the 1490s. ^{3 4}