"Disarming Women, Taming the Image: Women's depiction in the sixteenth-century paintings of Shah Tahmasp's manuscript of the Khamseh"

Depiction of women in seventeenth-century Persian painting enjoyed increased attention in recent years, particularly the figure of the “European woman” as a new exotic type in mural and manuscript paintings. However, before the emergence of this new motif, the way women are depicted in sixteenth-century Persian manuscript painting has evaded scholarly scrutiny, which is to the detriment of our understanding both of sixteenth-century manuscripts, and of what came after them—the trope of the European woman. This paper analyzes how women appear (and, significantly, do not appear) in an important sixteenth-century manuscript copy of medieval poet Nizami’s Khamseh that was prepared for Iran’s great patron of the arts, Shah Tahmasp (r. 1524-76). In Nizami’s narrative, women at times hold power, ride on horses, and rescue the male heroes in significant ways—even though power is invariably restored back to men eventually. However, in the manuscript’s sixteenth-century paintings, even such transitory moments of power are denied to the female characters through a wide array of visual techniques. These include collapsing multiple temporalities in one painting, erasing the presence of women, and depicting women without their weapons, which breaks with iconographic tradition and narrative integrity of the paintings. I argue that these visual elements constitute a significant precursor to the European woman type and they demonstrate how both women and images hold a kind of power that the manuscript had to tame in order to become the embodiment of Shah Tahmasp’s wealth and power that we take the manuscript to be today.