I was terrified by the passion of red in one bustling picture, wherein I at once recognized the touch of each of my master miniaturists in each corner. An artist’s hand that I couldn’t identify had applied a peculiar red to the painting under the guidance of an arcane logic, and the entire world revealed by the illustration was slowly suffused by this color. I spent some time hunched over this crowded picture pointing out to Black which of my miniaturists had drawn the plane tree (Stork), the ships and houses (Olive), and the kite and flowers (Butterfly).
“Of course, a great master miniaturist like yourself, who’s been head of a book-arts division for years, could distinguish the craft of each of his illustrators, the disposition of their lines and the temperament of their brush strokes,” Black said. “But when an eccentric book lover like my Enishte forces these same illustrators to paint with new and untried techniques, how can you determine the artists responsible for each design with such certainty?”
I decided to answer with a parable: “Once upon a time there was a shah who ruled over Isfahan; he was a lover of book arts, and lived all alone in his castle. He was a strong and mighty, intelligent, but merciless shah, and he had love only for two things: the illustrated manuscripts he commissioned and his daughter. So devoted was this shah to his daughter that his enemies could hardly be faulted for claiming he was in love with her-for he was proud and jealous enough to declare war on neighboring princes and shahs in the event that one sent ambassadors to ask for her hand. Naturally, there was no husband worthy of his daughter, and he confined her to a room, accessible only through forty locked doors. In keeping with a commonly held belief in Isfahan, he thought that his daughter’s beauty would fade if other men laid eyes on her. One day, after an edition of Hüsrev and Shirin that he’d commissioned was inscribed and illustrated in the Herat style, a rumor began to circulate in Isfahan: The pale-faced beauty who appeared in one bustling picture was none other than the jealous shah’s daughter! Even before hearing the rumors, the shah, suspicious of this mysterious illustration, opened the pages of the book with trembling hands and in a flood of tears saw that his daughter’s beauty had indeed been captured on the page. As the story goes, it wasn’t actually the shah’s daughter, protected by forty locked doors, who emerged to be portrayed one night, but her beauty which escaped from her room like a ghost stifled by boredom, reflecting off a series of mirrors and passing beneath doors and through keyholes like a ray of light or wisp of smoke to reach the eyes of an illustrator working through the night. The masterful young miniaturist, unable to restrain himself, depicted the beauty, which he couldn’t bear to behold, in the illustration he was in the midst of completing. It was the scene that showed Shirin gazing upon a picture of Hüsrev and falling in love with him during the course of a countryside outing.”
“My beloved master, my good sir, this is quite a coincidence,” said Black. “I, too, am quite fond of that scene from Hüsrev and Shirin.”
“These aren’t fables, but events that actually happened,” I said. “Listen, the miniaturist didn’t depict the shah’s beautiful daughter as Shirin, but as a courtesan playing the lute or setting the table, because that was the figure he was in the midst of illustrating at the time. As a result, Shirin’s beauty paled beside the extraordinary beauty of the courtesan standing off to the side, thus disrupting the painting’s balance. After the shah saw his daughter in the painting, he wanted to locate the gifted miniaturist who’d depicted her. But the crafty miniaturist, fearing the shah’s wrath, had rendered both the courtesan and Shirin, not in his own style, but in a new way so as to conceal his identity. The skillful brush strokes of quite a few other miniaturists had gone into the work as well.”
“How had the shah discovered the identity of the miniaturist who portrayed his daughter?”
“From the ears!”
“Whose ears? The ears of the daughter or her picture?”
“Actually, neither. Following his intuition, he first laid out all the books, pages and illustrations that his own miniaturists had made and inspected all the ears therein. He saw what he’d known for years in a new light: Regardless of the level of talent, each of the miniaturists made ears in his own style. It didn’t matter if the face they depicted was the face of a sultan, a child, a warrior, or even, God forbid, the partially veiled face of Our Exalted Prophet, or even, God forbid again, the face of the Devil. Each miniaturist, in each case, always drew the ears the same way, as if this were a secret signature.”
“Why?”
“When the masters illustrated a face, they focused on approaching its exalted beauty, on the dictates of the old models of form, on the expression, or on whether it should resemble somebody real. But when it came time to make the ears, they neither stole from others, imitated a model nor studied a real ear. For the ears, they didn’t think, didn’t aspire to anything, didn’t even stop to consider what they were doing. They simply guided their brushes from memory.”
“But didn’t the great masters also create their masterpieces from memory without ever even looking at real horses, trees or people?” said Black.
“True,” I said, “but those are memories acquired after years of thought, contemplation and reflection. Having seen plenty of horses, illustrated and actual, over their lifetimes, they know that the last flesh-and-blood horse they see before them will only mar the perfect horse they hold in their thoughts. The horse that a master miniaturist has drawn tens of thousands of times eventually comes close to God’s vision of a horse, and the artist knows this through experience and deep in his soul. The horse that his hand draws quickly from memory is rendered with talent, great effort, and insight, and it is a horse that approaches Allah’s horse. However, the ear that is drawn before the hand has accumulated any knowledge, before the artist has weighed and considered what it is doing, or before paying attention to the ears of the shah’s daughter, will always be a flaw. Precisely because it is a flaw, or imperfection, it will vary from miniaturist to miniaturist. That is, it amounts to a signature.”
There was a commotion. The Commander’s men were bringing into the old workshop the pages they’d collected from the homes of the miniaturists and the calligraphers.
“Besides, ears are actually a human flaw,” I said, hoping Black would smile. “They’re at once distinct and common to everyone: a perfect manifestation of ugliness.”
“What happened to the miniaturist who’d been caught by the authorities through his style of painting ears?”
I refrained from saying, “He was blinded,” to keep Black from becoming even more downcast. Instead, I responded, “He married the shah’s daughter, and this method, which has been used to identify miniaturists ever since, is known by many khans, shahs and sultans who fund book-arts workshops as the ”courtesan method.“ Furthermore, it is kept secret so that if one of their miniaturists makes a forbidden figure or a small design that conceals some mischief and later denies having done so, they can quickly determine who was responsible-genuine artists have an instinctive desire to draw what’s forbidden! Sometimes their hands make mischief on their own. Uncovering these transgressions involves finding trivial, quickly drawn and repetitive details removed from the heart of the painting, such as ears, hands, grass, leaves, or even horses’ manes, legs or hooves. But beware, the method doesn’t work if the illustrator himself is mindful that this detail has become his own secret signature. Mustaches won’t work, for instance, because many artists are aware how freely they’re drawn as a sort of signature anyway. But eyebrows are a possibility: No one pays much attention to them. Come now, let’s see which young masters have brought their brushes and reed pens to bear upon late Enishte’s illustrations.”