Esoteric Images: Decoding the Late Herat School of Painting

Tawfiq Daʿadli, Ph.D. (2012), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is a Doctor of Art History at that university. He has published articles on Islamic Art and Archaeology.

• AcknowledgmentsList of FiguresIntroduction1 Historical and Cultural Contexts1 The Timurid Empire2 The City of Herat3 The Kitāb-khāna in Herat4 Niẓāmī Ganjāvī2 Focusing the Gaze in Late Timurid Painting1 Hārūn al-Rashīd in the ḥammām2 The King Who Turned into a Parrot3 The Garden Master and the Maidens4 Conclusion3 The Iskandar Cycle1 Iskandar and the Philosophers2 Iskandar Beats the Drum3 Iskandar Meets the Dervish4 Conclusion4 Making Justice1 Khusrau before His Father Hurmuz-Shāh2 Sultan Sanjar and the Old Lady5 Death and Annihilation1 Farhād’s Death2 Laylī’s Husband’s Death3 The Death of Majnūn4 Building the Khawarnaq Palace5 Conclusion6 Concluding the Poetics of Painting1 Enhancing the Meaning2 Observations on Space3 ConclusionEpilogueBibliographyIndex

"L’auteur nous offre une belle synthèse des travaux antérieurs à ce sujet tout en proposant une interprétation nouvelle de certaines images." - Aïda El Hiari, Sorbonne-Université, in: Bulletin critique des Annales islamologiques 35 (2021)"Daʿadli’s book gives a good impression of the process of “decoding” paintings of the late Timurid period during more than forty years of scholarship and provides some new interpretations." - Ilse Sturkenboom, University of St Andrews, UK, in: Der Islam 97: 1 (2020)