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blindness, the ageless sorrow and secret desire of the genuine miniaturist,

appeared to the observer as the prologue to a joyous celebration.

My eyes wandered over these pictures and volumes, no less with the

excitement of one who wanted to behold for himself these legends he’d heard

about for years than with the worry of an old man who sensed he would soon

enough never see anything more. There, in the cold Treasury room suffused

with a dark red that I’d never seen before—caused by the color of the cloth

and dust within the peculiar light of the candles—I would occasionally cry out

in admiration, whereupon Black and the dwarf would rush to my side and

look over my shoulder at the magnificent page before me. Unable to restrain

myself, I’d begin to explain:

“This color red belongs to the great master Mirza Baba Imami from Tabriz,

the secret of which he took with him to the grave. He’s used it for the edges of

the carpet, the red of Alevi allegiance on the Persian Shah’s turban, and look,

it’s here on the belly of the lion on this page and on this pretty boy’s caftan.

Allah never directly revealed this fine red except when He let the blood of his

subjects flow. So that we might wearily strive to find this variety of red that is

only visible to the naked eye on man-made cloth and in the pictures of the

greatest of masters, God did, however, consign its secret to the rarest of insects

living beneath stones,” I said and added, “Thanks be to Him who has now

revealed it to us.”

“Look at this,” I said much later, once again unable to refrain from showing

them a masterpiece—this one could’ve belonged in any collection of ghazals,

which spoke of love, friendship, spring and happiness. We looked at the trees

of springtime blooming in an array of color, the cypresses in a garden

reminiscent of Heaven and the elation of the beloveds reclining in that garden

as they drank wine and recited poetry; it was as if we in the moldy, dusty and

icy Treasury could also smell those spring blossoms and the delicately scented

skin of the joyous revelers. “Notice how the same artist who rendered the

forearms of the lovers, their beautiful naked feet, the elegance of their stances

and the lazy delight of the birds fluttering about them with such sincerity, also

made the crude shape of the cypress in the background!” I said, “This is the

work of Lütfi of Bukhara whose ill-temper and belligerence caused him to leave

each of his illustrations half finished; he fought with every shah and khan

claiming that they understood nothing of painting, and he never remained in

one city for long. This great master went from one shah’s palace to another,

from city to city, quarreling all the way, never able to find a ruler whose book

was deserving of his talents, until he ended up in the workshop of an

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inconsequential chieftain who ruled over nothing but bare mountaintops.

Claiming that ”the khan’s dominions might be small but he knows painting,“

he spent the remaining twenty-five years of his life there. Whether he ever

knew that this inconsequential lord was blind remains, even today, a subject of

conjecture and a source of humor.”

“Do you see this page?” I said well into the night, and this time they both

rushed to my side, candlesticks aloft. “From the time of Tamerlane’s

grandchildren to the present, this volume has seen ten owners on its way here

from Herat over a span of one hundred fifty years.” Using my magnifying lens,

the three of us read the signatures, dedications, historical information and

names of sultans—who’d strangled one another—filling every corner of the

colophon page, pinched together, between and on top of each other: “This

volume was completed in Herat, with the help of God, by the hand of

Calligrapher Sultan Veli, son of Muzaffer of Herat, in the year of the Hegira

849 for Ismet-üd Dünya, the wife of Muhammad Juki the victorious brother of

the Ruler of the World, Baysungur.” Later still, we read that the book had

passed into the possession of the Whitesheep Sultan Halil, thence to his son

Yakup Bey, and thence to the Uzbek sultans in the North, each of whom

happily amused himself with the book for a time, removing or adding one or

two pictures; beginning with the first owner, they added the faces of their

beautiful wives to the illustrations and appended their names proudly to the

colophon page; afterward, it passed to Sam Mirza who’d conquered Herat,

and he made a present of it, with a separate dedication, for his elder brother,

Shah Ismail, who in turn brought it to Tabriz and had it prepared as a gift with

yet another dedication. When the denizen of paradise Sultan Selim the Grim

defeated Shah Ismail at Chaldiran and plundered the Seven Heavens Palace in

Tabriz, the book ended up here in this Treasury in Istanbul, after traveling

across deserts, mountains and rivers along with the victorious sultan’s

soldiers.

How much of an aging master’s interest and excitement did Black and the

dwarf share? As I opened new volumes and turned their pages, I sensed the

profound sorrow of thousands of illustrators from hundreds of cities large and

small, each with a distinctive temperament, each painting under the patronage

of a different cruel shah, khan or chieftain, each displaying his talent and

succumbing to blindness. I felt the pain of the beatings we all received during

our long apprenticeships, the blows inflicted with rulers, until our cheeks

turned bright red, or with marble polishing stones upon our shaven heads, as I

flipped—with humiliation—through the pages of a primitive book that

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displayed methods and implements of torture. I had no idea what this

miserable book was doing in the Ottoman Treasury: Instead of seeing torture

as a necessary practice administered before the supervision of a judge to

ensure Allah’s justice in the world, infidel travelers would convince their

coreligionists of our cruelty and evil-heartedness by having dishonorable

miniaturists abase themselves and dash off these pictures in exchange for a few

gold pieces. I was embarrassed at the obvious depraved pleasure with which

this miniaturist had drawn pictures of bastinados, beatings, crucifixions,

hangings by the neck or the feet, hookings, impalings, firings from cannon,

nailings, stranglings, the cutting of throats, feedings to hungry dogs,

whippings, baggings, pressings, soakings in cold water, the plucking of hair, the

breaking of fingers, the delicate flayings, the cutting off of noses and the

removal of eyes. Only true artists like us who’d suffered throughout our

apprenticeships merciless bastinados, random pummelings and fists so that

the irritable master who drew a line incorrectly might feel better—not to

mention hours of blows from sticks and rulers so that the devil within us

would perish to be reborn as the jinn of inspiration—only we could feel such

extreme joy by depicting bastinados and tortures, only we could color these

implements with the gaiety of coloring a child’s kite.

Hundreds of years hence, men looking at our world through the

illustrations we’ve made won’t understand anything. Desiring to take a closer

look, yet lacking the patience, they might feel the embarrassment, the joy, the

deep pain and pleasure of observation I now feel as I examine pictures in this

freezing Treasury—but they’ll never truly know. As I turned the pages with my

old fingers numbed from the cold, my trusty mother-of-pearl-handled

magnifying lens and my left eye passed over the pictures like an old stork

traversing the earth, little surprised by the view below, yet still astonished to

see new things. From these pages withheld from us for years, some of them

legendary, I came to know which artist had learned what from whom, in

which workshop under which shah’s patronage the thing we now call “style”

first took shape, which fabled master had worked for whom, and how, for

example, the curling Chinese clouds I knew had spread throughout Persia from

Herat under Chinese influence were also used in Kazvin. I would occasionally

allow myself an exhausted “Aha!”; but an agony lurked deeper within me, a

melancholy and regret I can scarcely share with you for the belittled,

tormented, pretty, moon-faced, gazelle-eyed, sapling-thin painters—battered

by masters—who suffered for their art, yet remained full of excitement and

hope, enjoying the affection that developed between them and their masters

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and their shared love of painting, before succumbing to anonymity and

blindness after long years of toil.

It was with such melancholy and regret that I entered this world of fine and

delicate feelings, the possibility of whose depiction my soul had quietly

forgotten over years of rendering wars and celebrations for Our Sultan. In an

album of collected pictures I saw a red-lipped, thin-waisted Persian boy

holding a book on his lap exactly as I was holding one at that moment, and it

reminded me of what shahs with a weakness for gold and power always forget:

The world’s beauty belongs to Allah. On the page of another album drawn by

a young master from Isfahan, with tears in my eyes, I beheld two marvelous

youths in love with each other, and was reminded of the love my own

handsome apprentices nourished for painting. A tiny-footed, transparent-

skinned, weak and girlish youth had bared a delicate forearm, which aroused

in one the desire to kiss it and die, while a cherry-lipped, almond-eyed,

sapling-thin, button-nosed beauty of a maiden gazed with wonder—as though

viewing three lovely flowers—upon the three small, deep marks of passion the

youth had burned onto the inside of that adorable arm to demonstrate the

strength of his love and his attachment to her.

Oddly, my heart began to quicken and pound. As had happened sixty years

ago in my early apprenticeship, while I was looking at some rather indecent

illustrations of handsome marble-skinned boys and slim small-breasted

maidens drawn in the black-ink style of Tabriz, beads of sweat accumulated on

my forehead. I recalled the passion for painting I felt and the depth of thought

I experienced when, a few years after I’d married and taken my first steps

toward master status, I saw a lovely angel-faced, almond-eyed, rose-petal-

skinned youth brought in as an apprentice candidate. For a moment, I had the

strong feeling that painting was not about melancholy and regret but about

this desire I felt and that it was the talent of the master artist that first

transformed this desire into a love of God and then into a love of the world as

God saw it; so strong was this feeling that it caused me to relive with ecstatic

delight all the years I’d spent over the drawing board until my back was

hunched, all the beatings I’d endured while learning my craft, my dedication

to courting blindness through illustration and all the agonies of painting I’d

suffered and made others suffer. As if running my eyes over something

forbidden, I stared long and silently at this wondrous illustration with the

same delight. Much later I was still staring. A teardrop slid from my eye over

my cheek into my beard.

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When I noticed that one of the candlesticks slowly floating through the

Treasury was approaching me, I put the album away and randomly opened

one of the volumes the dwarf had recently set beside me. This was a special

album prepared for shahs: I saw two deer at the edge of a green copse

enamored of each other, with jackals watching them in hostile envy. I turned

the page: Chestnut and bay horses that could’ve been the work of only one of

the old masters of Herat—how spectacular they were! I turned the page: A

confidently seated governmental official greeted me from a seventy-year-old

picture; I couldn’t determine who it was from the face because he looked like

anybody, or so I thought, yet the air of the painting, the seated man’s beard

painted in various hues recalled something. My heart beat quickly as I

recognized the execution of the magnificent hand in the piece. My heart knew

before I did, only he could’ve drawn such a splendid hand: This was the work

of Bihzad. It was as if light were gushing from the painting to my face.

I had seen pictures drawn by the Great Master Bihzad a few times before;

perhaps because I hadn’t looked at them alone, but in a group of former

masters years ago, perhaps because we couldn’t be certain whether it was

indeed the work of the great Bihzad, I hadn’t been as taken as I was now.

The heavy moldy darkness of the Treasury chamber seemed to brighten.

This beautifully drawn hand merged in my mind with that thin, magnificent

arm branded with signs of love, which I’d just now seen. Again, I praised God

for showing me such spectacular beauty before I went blind. How do I know

I’ll soon be blind? I don’t know! I sensed that I could share this intuition of

mine with Black, who’d sidled up to me holding a candle and was looking at

the page, but something else came out of my mouth.

“Behold the remarkable rendering of the hand,” I said. “It’s Bihzad.”

My hand went of its own will to hold Black’s, as if it were holding the hand

of one of those soft, velvet-skinned, beautiful apprentice boys, each of whom

I’d loved in my youth. His hand was smooth and firm, warmer than my own,