Persian Miniature Painting (Titley, 1983)

"Persian Miniature Painting and its Influence on the Art of Turkey and India" is a book by Norah Titley, published by the British Library in London in 1983, which builds a history of Persian painting on the British Library's manuscripts. ^{2 1}

In fifteen chapters it follows Persian painting from its antecedents and the Mongol invasions to the fourteenth-century schools of Tabriz, Baghdad and Shiraz, Herat under the Timurids, then Safavid Tabriz, Bukhara, Shiraz, Qazvin, Mashhad and the age of Shah Abbas, its influence in Ottoman Turkey, the Indian Sultanates and Mughal India, and closes with chapters on methods and materials and on the illustrated literature. ¹

In her introduction the author notes manuscripts acquired to fill gaps in the history of styles: a Kalila wa Dimna of 1307 linking Arab painting in Iraq with Shiraz painting, a Khamsa of Nizami of 1386 and 1388 that predates the Khvaju Kirmani manuscript of 1396 by ten years, and a manuscript dated Herat 1421, when Baysunghur was setting up his academy. ³