13), and the other being one of the Jalāyerid sultans: “Khvaja ‘Abd al-Ḥayy… instructed Sultan Ahmad in depiction so that the Sultan himself produced a scene in the Abusa‘idnama in pen and ink ” (Thackston, p.
Solaymān HERAVI) mentions two persons proficient in qalam-siāhi, one being Amir Dowlatyār, a pupil of the famous Aḥmad Musā (Thackston, p. However, the albums do include a sizable body of drawings from the main schools up to the end of the 15th century, namely the Mozaffarid, Jalāyerid and Turkmen period.ĭust Moḥammad (see DUST-MOḤAMMAD b. Although certain paintings and calligraphies in the albums date back to the Il-khanid period, it is unclear whether any of the drawings were produced that early. The drawings in the albums range from highly finished products designed to stand on their own, to practice sketches and preliminary drawings for manuscript paintings. Included in both are a substantial number of drawings of Chinese origin (Cahill), whose importation in the Il-khanid period may well have stimulated the subsequent workshop production of drawings (see IL-KHANIDS iii.
The Topkapi Saray Library albums, and the closely related Diez albums in Berlin (Roxburgh, 1995), provide the most significant body of material for the study of early drawings produced during 14th and 15th centuries. The disparity is not so noticeable in Persian manuscripts where the under-drawing is typically sketchier ( FIGURE 1). In an unfinished Arabic manuscript of al-Ḥariri’s Maqāmāt, the under-drawing is relatively finished and shows greater vivacity and spontaneity than the finished paintings in the same manuscript (Haldane, fig. The planning of any painting involved laying down a preliminary drawing in red or black ink, which would later be painted over.
While medieval Iranian artists were more renowned for their painting than their drawing skills, the two mediums were not unrelated. This collection contains some of the most interesting as well as controversial drawings in the field (Rogers O’Kane, 2003b). ‘black pen’), a term referring to both the genre of paintings or drawings done in pen and ink (also known as qalam-siāhi Swietochowski), and to the painter or, more likely, painters (more commonly known as Siāh-qalam) of a particular collection of such pen and ink drawings, preserved principally in the albums at Topkapi Saray Library (see TOPKAPI PALACE).