Siyah mashq (calligraphic practice sheet)

For Maryam Ekhtiar, a calligrapher's training was long and rigorous, passing from master to apprentice and often within a family; a student earned a licence only after years of copying the master's models, which meant hours of practice known as mashq. ² She quotes Sultan Ali Mashhadi's advice to collect the writing of the masters, then keep to the one you feel drawn to and look at no other, so that your eye is saturated with his hand. ² See ijaza.

Calligraphers copied letters or groups of letters over and over to strengthen the hand and instil discipline, leaving a heavily blackened sheet with little of the paper showing, called mashq or siyah mashq ("black exercise"). Such sheets were part of the path to a finished folio; regarded as the most immediate trace of the calligrapher's pen — an extension of hand, mind and soul — they were usually devoid of textual meaning and enjoyed for their beauty alone, collected, exchanged as gifts, set in borders and mounted in albums with paintings. ¹

The art of siyah mashq emerged in Iran in the late sixteenth century and surged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Iran and Ottoman Turkey, where it was called karalama. Calligraphers of all ranks made them, many of them court masters, and rulers sometimes penned them as gifts or for royal albums. ¹

The Met holds a siyah mashq by Muhammad Shah Qajar dated Shawwal 1260 AH/October 1844 CE, in nasta'liq flowing in every direction and dedicated to his wife Khadija Sultan, and another by his court calligrapher Asadullah Shirazi (1258 AH/1842–43 CE), who styles himself "scribe of His Royal Highness". In both the text is illegible; the stress is on the rhythm and harmony of the letters and the layout of the page. ³ The author also links the work of the contemporary artist Golnaz Fathi to the rhythm of these pages. ⁴