The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, v. 29, no. 8 (April, 1971)

8. The Assassination of Khusraw Parviz. 11 3/16 x 10 3/4 inches. Fol. 742v. 1970.301.75The Assassination of Khusraw Parviz (Figure 8) illustrates one of thehistorical parts of Firdowsi's epic, in which a deposed shah is killed bya paid assassin on the order of his weak and intimidated son. In the text,this tragic episode in Sasanian history is described with deep feeling anda mounting sense of hopelessness. In the picture, the assassin, whose facehas been somewhat abraded, is painted rather more naturalistically thanusual. For the most part, however, the artist has dwelt upon the setting,a palace by night. The ladies of the harem wander about obliviously; thepageboys and watchmen gossip or sleep on duty. This picture is the workof another of the younger artists, who had grown up at Shah Tahmasp'scourt. The violent campaigning, low humor, and high spirits of the earlyyears of Safavid rule would probably have seemed coarse and offensiveto his ilk. As we can see from his painting, this was a time for understatement.Only by the closest scrutiny, by alerting all of our sensibilities,can we detect the horror. Times have changed. Humor has given way towit; monsters such as the lion-ape no longer scare; cruel deeds are nowshown at a distance, as though to keep the blood from our hands. By thetime this picture was painted, Shah Isma'il's ecstatic poetry would havebeen condemned as the raving of a dangerous fanatic; and the miniaturesfrom the first years of the project must have seemed disturbingly oldfashioned.NotesAlthough thousands of Safavid manuscripts of our period have survived, only ahandful can be considered to be of comparable artistic importance:About 1526: Hafiz Diwan, Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum, four (formerly five) miniatures.1526/27: Nawa'i Collected Works, Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, sup. turc 316, sixminiatures.1539-1543: Nizami, Khamseh, London, British Museum, Or. 2265, fourteen contemporaryminiatures.1556-1565: Jami, Haft Awrang, Washington, D. C., Freer Gallery of Art, 46.12, twentyeightminiatures.Ali, a sixteenth-century Turkish source, claims that Shah Isma'il was concernedabout Bihzad's safety at the battle of Chaldiran, near Tabriz, in 1514. This story is notgiven elsewhere, and would seem to be apocryphal.