Herāt School (painting)

Although it would flourish for fewer than fifty years, the fifteenth century Herāt school produced one of the most enduring and distinctive bodies of High Byzantine Persian art. The artists of the Herāt school were court painters, calligraphers, and engravers who were for the most part manuscript illustrators, or illuminators. Located in western Afghanistan, in the capital city of Herāt, the court sponsored a school of painting that centered on a thriving workshop where artists with painstaking care illustrated classic works of Islamic literature—epic poems, histories, and theological texts. Under the patronage of the Timurid court, one of the most powerful Muslim ruling dynasties of the late Persian Empire, the artists of the Herāt school advanced the art of miniature painting, with extravagant detailing and rich coloring, and pioneered the mathematical redesign of the canvas space to create what would later be termed perspective.

Brief History

Given Islam’s profound respect for the written work, manuscript illumination was long a critical element of its art. Despite the long-standing religious prohibitions against picturing the human form in Islamic tradition, manuscript illustrating was given a dispensation. Unlike more familiar expressions of art from the era—murals, for instance, and canvas paintings—manuscript illustrations were small scaled productions designed for limited ownership and never intended for wide display. In addition, they were regarded as avenues for opening up written texts, themselves most often religious in nature or works that glorified the achievements of Muslim rulers. Manuscript illumination was considered a reverent, even religious act. Unlike other forms of miniaturist painting, which were done on silk and often were more decorative and ornamental, manuscript illumination was considered a practical, indispensable element for maintaining interest and respect for the considerable library of Islamic writings.

As Herāt evolved into one of the most densely populated cities in the Persian Empire, it became an important crossroads for both trade and industry, and the court itself established sufficient military security to enable the evolution of the arts. The renowned workshop that was gathered about the court of the Timurids in the city inherited a long tradition of miniaturist illustration that dated to the Iranian Jalāyirid school nearly a century earlier and drew on elements of figurine depiction and landscape expression found in twelfth and thirteenth century Mongol painting from China.

Early on, the work of the Herāt court illuminators was largely conservative. The landscapes were simple; the few characters depicted in the scenes were flat and lacked narrative detailing; the colors were quiet and low keyed. The illustrations were regarded as supplements to the texts and designed not to distract. But the court artists (numbering more than forty at the height of the Herāt school’s influence), in robust dialogue with each other, began to move miniaturist painting itself into bolder, more realistic depictions that came to command attention as works of art themselves. Only when the city of Herāt itself was sacked by invading Uzbeks in 1507 did the school’s development abruptly cease—but its principal works, unlike murals or canvas paintings susceptible to deterioration and even destruction as public artifacts, were for centuries maintained in private libraries and have survived.

Overview

Given that the school itself was concentrated in a single court, indeed in a single workshop that itself lasted barely fifty years, the achievement of the Herāt school is perhaps best summarized in the work of its single most important artisan, Kamal Ud-Din Behzād (c. 1450–c.1535). Compared to the miniaturist illuminators of a scant generation, Behzād explored his subject matter with a boldness and a confidence that regarded the paintings as subjects unto themselves. His finest achievements, most notably his illustrations for the eleventh century Persian epic Book of Kings, encapsulate the creative energy and rich vision of the Herāt school.

Although Behzād, much as the other court illuminators, toiled for long hours on ornamental elements of manuscript illustrations (border trim and nonfigurative illustrations for opening and closing pages), he pioneered a new, aggressive element to those miniatures that accompanied the texts themselves. His signature works had narrative—multiple figures engaged in actual activity, whose expressive faces, gestures, and body language conveyed emotional subtleties and animation. The backgrounds were far more complicated, crowded with details Behzād drew from his observation of the city. Mountains and skies, trees and buildings, flat and lifeless before, were endowed with subtle, playful colorings that created depth and even the suggestion of movement. The figures evolved from the deliberately stylized vocabulary of earlier miniaturists. In such works, the figures were more or less interchangeable—mostly male, tall and thin with rather Modiglianiesque drooping oblong faces and nondescript pointed beards. The Herāt school endowed such caricatured figures with specificity (decorating their tables, for instance, with selected props or accessorizing their outfits with touches of individual expression), details of facial expression and gesture, even touches of individual garment color that created in each figure a satisfying individuality. That was all achieved within the compact scale and scope of the miniaturist—such detailing actually encouraged (and rewarded) close scrutiny apart from the study of the manuscript text. Behzād further extended the palette range—investing in his best work shadings of bright colors, applied with a refined and studied brushstrokes that created in turn an elaborate play of tones and shades.

But Behzād and the other artisans of the Herāt School are recognized within art history itself for their bold experiments in creating the visual narrative of perspective. By stacking a figure on top of another, a figure drawn slightly smaller, the artist can create the illusion of depth, giving the painting a rich sense of background new to miniaturist art. One figure appears to be behind the other, allowing the viewer to step into the painting’s narrative space, an element of diagonal dimension that significantly enhanced the visual experience. That was an element of detail entirely ignored by earlier generations of miniaturists. That, despite the relatively brief era of the Herāt school, represents its enduring achievement.

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