Patterns Under the Green Dome

The Art of Haft Peykar, part 3

We’re continuing to look at the details of six series of artworks that were inspired by Haft Peykar, the epic poem that tells of Shah Bahram and his seven brides. I gave a lengthier introduction to it in part 1 (Patterns under the Black Dome) and described how this romantic epic is also a barely veiled tale of initiation. Part 2 took place under the Yellow Dome.

Here are now the images¹ for the third stage of Bahram’s journey. Each is linked to its source page where you can zoom in on the fine details. You might want to read this post in a browser rather than email, so you can see the enlarged images.

The Green Dome

On Monday, Bahram visits Nâz-Pari, Princess of Khwarazm, clad in Green, under the sign of the Moon, Lady of Silver.

Chester Beatty Library Per 171, licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0

This manuscript continues to use the same two pattern bases, but it continues to vary their expression:

Here, by the simply expedient of not outlining the shapes, the artist has created a free-floating impression, though the elements are actually still defined by the patterns below.

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Metropolitan Museum of Art 13.228.7.12, public domain

The Metropolitan manuscript patterns all make up the same collection as seen previously, though C” is a new addition to the derivations of C.

The added triangle in C” is easy to add in by hand, but here’s how it’s done using the construction lines. As for D, the central octagons were omitted for a slightly different take on last time.

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Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art F1908.273

This image has visibly lost its original colour, which obviously must have been dominated by green. But I really can’t tell what exactly was originally used. If it had been verdigris, I would expect a much browner and much more deteriorated page; it wouldn’t have faded gently! My best guess, without having the physical page in front of me, is that a plant colour was involved, either a plant green or a blue, that has either faded to yellow or was mixed with a yellow pigment, which has survived on its own. Whatever it is, it has made the patterns barely visible but zooming in reveals an interesting assortment.

I only just realised that I didn’t include the H pattern from which H’ and H” are derived – apologies! But it’s just a stripped down version of H’, with the same basis you see in blue. This family of patterns shows up so consistently on window panels and other woodwork in the images, that I suspect they were favoured for that use in real life.

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Folio 159v

On the right wall here there is an unmistakeable representation of perspective (but without vanishing point): the patterns have been visibly skewed to show the wall is at a different angle. The skewing doesn’t actually match the naturalistic perspective, but the purpose of it is just to indicate a change of angle; if you look at the pavilion as a whole—and the same goes for all the images— its apparently strange architecture is simply an artistic device to show us the front, side(s), top inside and outside at the same time. It’s giving us a story to read, not an accurate snapshot of what a single observer would see from a given standpoint (which is what perspective drawing does).

Among the familiar patterns, K is a brand new one!

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MS Add.3139

Cambridge once more out-colours everyone else with a small number of patterns.

But here’s a new and clever variant of G: G” is created by simply merging the hexagrams and hexagons in a certain way.

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British Library, Add MS 6613

Finally, even the BL’s lone dome pattern is given a twist by the addition of lines running through the squares – and it looks every bit like tartan in this colour combination…

This concludes our survey of patterns under the Green Dome, to be continued soon under the Red Dome.

We’re nearly halfway through and I’ve been thinking it might be nice, once this series is complete, to make a handbook detailing how to construct these step-by-step. I may not be able to do it for all the manuscripts, depending on permissions, but focusing on one at a time for those I can use would allow for a more systematic approach. Let me know how that sounds in the poll below:

1. The sources of these images are the following manuscripts, from the oldest to the newest:

1. Chester Beatty Library, Per 171 (AD 1492, AH 897), unknown artist.

2. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 13.228.7.8 (AD 1524, AH 931), painted by Shaikh Zada.

3. Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, F1908.271 to 277 (AD 1548, AH 955), unknown artist

4. Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Départment des Manuscrits, Supplément Persan 1956 (AD 1560, AH 965), unknown artist

5. Cambridge University Library, MS Add.3139 (17th c. AD, 11th c. AH), unknown artist.

6. British Library, Add MS 6613, ff138v-196r (AD 1671, AH 1076), painted by Ṭālib Lālā.