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elderly masters, along with their apprentices, these artisans who made

masterpieces in Shah Tahmasp’s workshops, painters and colorists whose

brushes made horses gallop at full speed and whose butterflies fluttered off

the page, all of these master binders and calligraphers, every last one was left

without work, penniless and destitute, homeless and bereft. Some migrated to

the North among the Uzbeks, some West to India. Others took up different

types of work, wasting themselves and their honor, and still others entered the

service of insignificant princes and provincial governors, all sworn enemies of

each other, to begin working on palm-size books containing at most a few

leaves of illustration. Rapidly transcribed, hastily painted, cheap books

appeared everywhere, matching the tastes of common soldiers, boorish pashas

and spoiled princes.”

“How much would they go for?” asked Master Osman.

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“I hear that the great Sadiki Bey illustrated a copy of Strange Creatures,

commissioned by an Uzbek spahi cavalryman, for only forty gold pieces. In the

tent of a vulgar pasha who was returning from his Eastern campaign to

Erzurum, I beheld an album consisting of lewd pictures including paintings by

the virtuoso Siyavush. A few great masters who hadn’t abandoned illustrating

were making and selling individual pieces, which weren’t part of any story at

all. By examining such single leaves, you couldn’t tell which scene or which

story it represented; rather, you would admire it for its own sake, for the

pleasure of beholding alone. For example, you might comment, ”This is the

exact likeness of a horse, how beautiful,“ and you’d pay the artist on this basis.

Scenes of combat or fucking are quite common. The price for a bustling battle

has fallen to three hundred silver coins, and there are hardly any interested

clients. To sell pieces on the cheap and to better lure a buyer, some simply

draw in black ink on nonsized, unfinished paper with nary a brushstroke of

color.”

“There was a gilder of mine who was content as content could be and

talented as talent would allow,” said Master Osman. “He saw to his work with

such elegance that we referred to him as ”Elegant Effendi.“ But he has

abandoned us. It’s been six days, and he’s not to be found anywhere. He’s

plain disappeared.”

“How could anyone quit such a workshop as this, such a joyous hearth?” I

said.

“Butterfly, Olive, Stork and Elegant, the four young masters whom I’ve

trained since they were apprentices, now work at home at Our Sultan’s

behest,” said Master Osman.

This apparently came about so they could work more comfortably on the

Book of Festivities with which the entire workshop was involved. This time, the

Sultan hadn’t arranged for a special workspace for His master miniaturists in

the palace courtyard; rather, He decreed that they work on this special book at

home. When it occurred to me that this order was probably issued for the sake

of my Enishte’s book, I fell silent. To what degree was Master Osman making

insinuations?

“Nuri Effendi,” he called to a pale and hunched painter, “present Our

Master Black with a ”survey‘ of the workshop!“

The “survey” was a regular ritual of Our Sultan’s bimonthly visits to the

miniaturists’ atelier during that exciting time when His Excellency had intently

followed what transpired at the workshop. Under the auspices of Haz?m, the

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Head Treasurer; Lokman, the Head Poetic Chronicler and Master Osman, the

Head Illuminator, Our Sultan would be apprised of which pages in which

books the masters were working on at any given moment: who did which

gilding, who colored which picture, and one by one, how the colorists, the

page rulers, the gilders and the master miniaturists, whose talent allowed

them to accomplish miracles, were engaged. It saddened me that they were

holding a fake ceremony in place of the one that was no longer performed

because age and ill health bound the Head Poetic Chronicler Lokman Effendi,

who wrote most of the books which were illustrated, to his home; because

Master Osman often disappeared in a cloud of indignation and wrath; because

the four masters known as Butterfly, Olive, Stork and Elegant worked at home;

and because Our Sultan no longer waxed enthusiastic like a child in the

workshop. As happened to many miniaturists, Nuri Effendi had grown old in

vain, without having fully experienced life or become a master of his art. Not

in vain, however, did he spend those years over his worktable becoming

hunchbacked: He always paid close attention to what happened in the

workshop, to who made which exquisite page.

And so I eagerly beheld for the first time the legendary pages of the Book of

Festivities, which recounted the circumcision ceremonies of Our Sultan’s

prince. When I was still in Persia, I heard stories about this fifty-two-day

circumcision ceremony wherein people from all occupations and all guilds, all

of Istanbul, had participated, indeed at a time when the book that

memorialized the great event was yet being prepared.

In the first picture placed before me, fixed in the royal enclosure of late

Ibrahim Pasha’s palace, Our Sultan, the Refuge of the World, gazed upon the

festivities in the Hippodrome below with a look that bespoke His satisfaction.

His face, even though not so detailed as to permit one to distinguish Him from

others by features alone, was drawn adeptly and with reverence. As for the

right side of the double-leaf picture showing Our Sultan on the left, there were

viziers, pashas, Persian, Tatar, Frankish and Venetian ambassadors standing in

the arched colonnades and windows. Because they were not sultans, their eyes

were drawn hastily and carelessly and focused on nothing in particular besides

the general commotion in the square. Later, I noticed in other pictures that the

same arrangement and page composition repeated—even though the wall

ornamentation, the trees and terra-cotta shingles were depicted in different

styles and colors. Once the text was written out by scribes, the illustrations

completed and the book bound; the reader, turning pages, would each time

see completely different activities in completely different colors in the

Hippodrome which remained under the same watchful gazes of the Sultan and

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His crowd of guests—who always stood identically, forever gazing at the same

area below.

There before me I saw people scrambling for hundreds of bowls of pilaf that

were placed in the Hippodrome; I saw the live rabbits and birds emerge out of

the roast ox and startle the crowd that had descended upon it. I saw the

master coppersmiths’ guild riding in a wheeled cart before Our Sultan, its

members hammering away at copper but never striking the one among them

lying in the cart with the anvil balanced on his bare chest. I saw glaziers

embellishing glass with carnations and cypresses as they paraded before Our

Sultan in a wagon; confectioners reciting sweet poems as they drove camels

laden with sacks of sugar and displayed cages holding sugar-parrots; and aged

locksmiths who showed off a variety of hanging locks, padlocks, dead bolts

and gearlocks as they complained of the evils of new times and new doors.

Butterfly, Stork and Olive had worked on the picture that depicted the

magicians: One of them was causing eggs to march down a pole without

dropping them—as if on a broad slab of marble—to the beat of a tambourine

played by another. In one wagon I saw precisely how Sea-Captain K?l　 Ali

Pasha had forced the infidels he’d captured at sea to make an “infidels’

mountain” out of clay; he’d then loaded all the slaves into the cart, and when

he was right before the Sultan, he exploded the powder within the

“mountain” to demonstrate how he’d made infidel lands wail and moan with

cannon fire. I saw clean-shaven butchers wielding cleavers, wearing rose- and

purple-colored uniforms and smiling at the pink carcasses of skinned sheep

hanging from hooks. The spectators applauded lion tamers who’d brought a

chained lion before Our Sultan, provoking and enraging it until its eyes shone

bloodred with rage; and on the next page, I saw the lion, representing Islam,

chase away a gray-and-pink pig, symbolizing the cunning Christian infidel. I

indulged my eyes at length on a picture of a barber suspended upside down

from the ceiling of a shop built onto a cart, as he shaved a customer while his

assistant, dressed in red, held a mirror and a silver bowl containing fragrant

soap, waiting for baksheesh; I inquired after the identity of the magnificent

miniaturist responsible for the piece.

“It is indeed important that a painting, through its beauty, summon us

toward life’s abundance, toward compassion, toward respect for the colors of

the realm which God created, and toward reflection and faith. The identity of

the miniaturist is not important.”

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Was Nuri the Miniaturist, who was much more subtle in thought than I’d

assumed, being reserved because he understood that my Enishte sent me here

to investigate, or was he merely parroting Head Illuminator Master Osman?

“Is Elegant the one responsible for all this gilding work?” I asked. “Who’s

doing the gilding now, in his stead?”

The shouts and screams of children could now be heard through the open

door that faced the inner courtyard. Below, one of the division heads had

started administering the bastinado to apprentices who’d most likely been

caught with red ink powder in their pockets or gold leaf hidden away in a fold

of paper; probably the two whom I’d seen trembling as they waited in the

cold. Young painters, seizing an opportunity to mock them, ran to the door to

watch.

“By the time the apprentices paint the ground of the Hippodrome here a

rose color, finishing it off as our Master Osman has dictated,” said Nuri

Effendi cautiously, “our brother Elegant Effendi, God willing, will have

returned from wherever he’s gone and will complete the gilding on these two

pages. Our master, Osman the Miniaturist, wanted Elegant Effendi to color

the dirt floor of the Hippodrome differently in each scene. Rose pink, Indian

green, saffron yellow or the color of goose shit. Whosoever beholds the picture

will realize in the first rendering this is a dirt square and should be earth-

colored, but in the second and third pictures, he’ll want other colors to keep

himself amused. Embellishing ought to bring merriment to the page.”

I noticed some pictures on a sheet of paper that an assistant left in a corner.

He was working on a single-leaf picture for a Book of Victories, the depiction of

a naval fleet heading off to battle, but it was obvious that the screams of his

friends whose soles were being severely beaten, provoked the illustrator to run

off and watch. The fleet he made by repeatedly tracing identical ships with a

block pattern didn’t even seem to float in the sea; yet, this artificiality, the lack

of wind in the sails, had less to do with the block pattern than the young

painter’s lack of skill. I saw with sorrow that the pattern had been cut

violently out of an old book which I couldn’t identify, perhaps a collage album.

Obviously, Master Osman was overlooking quite a lot.

When we came to his own worktable, Nuri Effendi proudly stated that he

finished a gilded royal insignia for Our Sultan, which he’d been working on for

three weeks. I respectfully admired Nuri Effendi’s gold inlay and the insignia,

which had been made on an empty sheet to ensure that its recipient and the

reason for its being sent would remain secret. I knew well enough that many

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impetuous pashas in the East had refrained from rebellion upon seeing the

noble and potent splendor of the Sultan’s royal insignia.

Next, we saw the last masterpieces that Jemal the Calligrapher had

transcribed, completed and left behind; but we passed over them hastily to

avoid giving credence to opponents of color and decoration who maintained

that true art consisted of calligraphy alone and that decorative illumination

was simply a secondary means of adding emphasis.

Nas?r the Limner was making a mess of a plate he intended to repair from a

version of the Quintet of Nizami dating back to the era of Tamerlane’s sons;

the picture depicted Hüsrev looking at a naked Shirin as she bathed.

A ninety-two-year-old former master who was half blind and had nothing

to say besides claiming that sixty years ago he kissed Master Bizhad’s hand in

Tabriz and that the great master of legend was blind and drunk at the time,

showed us with trembling hands the ornamentation on the pen box he would

present as a holiday gift to Our Sultan when it was completed three months

hence.

Shortly a silence enveloped the whole workshop where close to eighty

painters, students and apprentices worked in the small cells which constituted

the lower floor. This was a postbeating silence, the likes of which I’d

experienced many times; a silence which would be broken at times by a nerve-

wracking chuckle or a witticism, at times by a few sobs or the suppressed

moan of the beaten boy before his crying fit would remind the master

miniaturists of the beatings they themselves received as apprentices. But the

half-blind ninety-two-year-old master caused me to sense something deeper