Persian Painting: The Arts of the Book and Portraiture - Tapa blanda

This is a luxuriously illustrated catalogue of more than forty extraordinary Persian miniature paintings, illuminated manuscripts and elaborately decorated bookbindings in The al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait, dating from the period before the Mongol invasions (11th–12th centuries CE) to the early 20th century. It includes rare examples from the pre-Mongol invasion period; fine illuminations of Qur’an manuscripts; Mu’nis al-Ahrar, an important early fourteenth-century anthology by Muhammad ibn Badr al-Din al-Jajarmi; material from dispersed manuscripts of Firdawsi’s Shah-nameh; two previously unpublished copies of Qazwini’s ‘Aja’ib al-Makhluqat; three copies of Nizami’s Khamsah; Sa‘di’s Golestan; and Jami’s Yusuf and Zulaykha and Subhat al-Abrar– as well as paintings from dispersed Safavid and post-Safavid albums, and seventeenth-century bookbindings and oil paintings from the Zand and Qajar periods.

Adel Adamova is a curator at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Manijeh Bayani is a specialist in Persian epigraphy, based in London.