Sultan Muhammad
1470–1555Persian (Safavid) · Persian Miniature Painting 1370–1600
He painted the most famous single page in Persian art — a mountain landscape whose rocks turn out, on inspection, to be full of hidden faces — and directed the most lavish manuscript project ever undertaken in Iran.
Formation
Head of the royal workshop at Tabriz under Shah Tahmasp of the Safavid dynasty, and tutor to the young shah, who was himself a trained painter. He belonged to the Turkmen tradition of western Iran, which was wilder and more animated than the refined Herat style, and the fusion of the two in the Tabriz workshop produced the classic Safavid manner. His major work is the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, a manuscript of over seven hundred pages with two hundred and fifty-eight illustrations, produced over roughly a decade.
Technique
The same kitabkhana method — opaque watercolour and gold on burnished paper, flat colour, no shadow, raised viewpoint — but pushed toward movement and density. Sultan Muhammad fills a page edge to edge, with figures spilling out of the ruled frame into the margins, and constructs landscapes from swirling, animated rock formations. The hidden faces in the rocks of the Court of Gayumars are painted at a scale that requires a magnifying glass, and they are not decorative: they belong to a tradition of concealed imagery that rewards prolonged looking.
The palette
The full Safavid range at maximum intensity, with a distinctive use of soft pinks, lilacs and pale gold against the saturated ultramarine and vermilion. He modulates hue across a rock face where earlier practice would have kept it flat, producing an iridescent, shifting surface. Gold is used structurally — as ground, as sky, as light — rather than as ornament, and the balance between the metallic and the mineral is what gives the pages their particular glow.
Legacy
The Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp was given as a diplomatic gift to the Ottoman sultan in 1568 and survived intact until the twentieth century, when it was bought by Arthur Houghton and broken up — individual pages were sold and donated separately, and the dispersal of one of the great books in world art is a standard cautionary tale in museum ethics. Around half the pages have since been reunited in Tehran.
Palette
The colours reconstructed for this artist, with the reasoning behind each.
Pigments used: Gold leaf · Malachite · Ultramarine · Ochre · Umber · Madder and the red lakes · Lead white · Silver