Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād
1450–1535Persian (Timurid/Safavid) · Persian Miniature Painting 1370–1600
The most celebrated painter of the Persian tradition, working at a scale of a few centimetres, in a medium where a single brush might be made from the hairs of a kitten's tail.
Formation
Orphaned young and raised in Herat under the patronage of the poet and statesman Mir Ali Shir Nava'i, in the workshop of the Timurid ruler Sultan Husayn Bayqara. Herat at the end of the fifteenth century was the intellectual centre of the eastern Islamic world, and the kitabkhana — a combined library, scriptorium and studio — brought together calligraphers, illuminators, gilders, papermakers and binders on single manuscripts. When the Safavids took Herat, Behzad eventually moved to Tabriz and was appointed director of the royal library.
Technique
Opaque watercolour and gold on burnished paper, at a size where a whole architectural scene occupies a page smaller than a hand. Pigments were ground by hand and bound in gum arabic, applied in flat unmodulated areas with no shading, and the finest brushes were made from a few squirrel or kitten hairs to allow lines almost invisible to the naked eye. The paper was burnished with an agate stone before and during painting to give a hard, smooth surface. There is no single-point perspective and no cast shadow; space is constructed by overlapping planes and by a raised viewpoint, and figures are distributed across the surface rather than converging on a centre.
The palette
Extremely saturated and expensive. Natural ultramarine from Badakhshan — the same mines that supplied Europe, but far closer — malachite green, vermilion, orpiment, red lead, verdigris, and gold applied both as leaf and as shell gold paint. Colours are used at full strength and juxtaposed without transition, and the effect depends on the exactness of the intervals rather than on modelling. The intense blue of a tiled wall against gold and vermilion is the signature chord of the tradition.
Legacy
His compositions were copied and adapted for generations across Persia, Mughal India and Ottoman Turkey, and his name became so authoritative that a great many works were attributed to him spuriously — the secure attributions are few and still debated. The Persian manuscript tradition also reached Europe and had a documented effect on Matisse, who saw an exhibition of Islamic art in Munich in 1910 and described it as a revelation.
Palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.
Pigments used: Ultramarine · Orpiment · Vermilion · Verdigris · Malachite · Ochre · Lead white