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whiteness of its teeth, in short, by the talent of the miniaturists who’d

depicted it (I was on the verge of determining precisely who’d worked on the

picture); on the other hand, I couldn’t forgive the way this talent had been

harnessed by the absurd logic of an inscrutable will. Neither the desire to

imitate the Europeans nor the excuse that the book Our Sultan had

commissioned as a present for the Doge ought to make use of techniques

familiar to the Venetians was adequate to explain the fawning pretension in

these pictures.

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

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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!”

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“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.

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“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.”

Thus we brought together the pages of two illustrated manuscripts, one

that was being completed secretly and the other openly, two books with

different stories and subjects, illustrated in two distinct styles; that is, deceased

Enishte’s book and the Book of Festivities recounting our prince’s circumcision

ceremony, whose creation was under my control. Black and I looked intently

wherever I moved my magnifying lens:

1. In the pages of the Book of Festivities, we first studied the open mouth of

the fox whose pelt a master of the furrier’s guild, in a red caftan and purple

sash, held on his lap as the guild passed before Our Sultan, watching the

parade from a loge made specifically for the event. Unmistakably, Olive had

made both the fox’s teeth, which were individually distinguishable, and the

teeth in Enishte’s illustration of Satan, an ominous creature, half-demon and

half-giant, that appeared to have come from Samarkand.

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2. On a particularly joyous day of the festivities, below Our Sultan’s loge

overlooking the Hippodrome, a division of impoverished frontier ghazis

appeared in tattered clothes. One of their lot made a plea: “My Exalted Sultan,

we, your heroic soldiers, fell captive as we fought the infidel in the name of our

religion and were only able to gain our freedom by leaving a number of our

brethren behind as hostages; that is, we were set free in order to amass

ransom. However, when we arrived back in Istanbul, we found everything so

expensive that we’ve been unable to collect the money to save our brethren

who languish as prisoners of the kaffirs. We’re at the mercy of your aid. Please

grant us gold or slaves that we might take back to exchange for their freedom.”

Stork clearly made the nails of the lazy dog off to the side—glaring with one

open eye at Our Sultan, at our poor, destitute ghazis and at the Persian and

Tatar ambassadors in the Hippodrome—as well as the nails of the dog

occupying a corner of the scene depicting the adventures of the Gold Coin in

Enishte’s book.

3. Among the jugglers spinning eggs on pieces of wood and turning

somersaults before Our Sultan was a bald man with bare calves wearing a

purple vest, who played a tambourine as he sat off to one side on a red carpet;

this man held the instrument exactly the same way the woman held a large

brass serving tray in the illustration of Red in Enishte’s book: doubtless the

work of Olive.

4. As the cooks’ guild pushed past Our Sultan, they were cooking stuffed

cabbage with meat and onions in a cauldron resting on a stove in their cart.

The master cooks accompanying the cart stood on pink earth resting their

stew pots on blue stones; these stones were rendered by the same artist who

made the red ones on dark-blue earth above which floated the half-ghostly

creature in the illustration that Enishte called Death: the unmistakable work of

Butterfly.

5. Mounted Tatar messengers brought word that the Persian Shah’s armies

had begun to mobilize for another campaign against the Ottomans, who

thereupon razed to the ground the exquisite observation kiosk of the Persian

ambassador who’d repeatedly affirmed to Our Sultan, Refuge of the World, in

a cascade of pleasantries, that the Shah was His friend and harbored nothing

but brotherly affection for Him. During this episode of wrath and destruction,

water bearers ran out to settle the dust raised in the Hippodrome, and a group

of men appeared shouldering leather sacks full of linseed oil to pour over a

mob ready to attack the ambassador, in hopes of pacifying it. The raised feet of

the water bearers and of the men carrying sacks of linseed oil were made by

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the same artist who painted the raised feet of charging soldiers in the

depiction of Red: also the work of Butterfly.

I wasn’t the one who made this last discovery as I directed our search for

clues, moving the magnifying lens right and left, to that picture then this one;

rather it was Black, who opened his eyes wide and scarcely blinked gripped by

the fear of torture and the hope of returning to his wife who awaited him at

home. Using the “courtesan method,” it took an entire afternoon to sort out

which of our miniaturists worked on each of the nine pictures left by the late

Enishte, and later, to interpret that information.

Black’s late Enishte didn’t limit any single page to the artistic talent of just

one miniaturist; all three of my master miniaturists worked on most of the