Autonomous Pictures? Persianate Drawings and Miniatures with Figural Motifs in the Diez Albums of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin

• Applicant: Dr. Friederike Weis
• Subject Area: Art History
• Term: from 2013 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 224786707

Accomplished drawings that were not attached to the realisation of an artistic work have usually been labelled “autonomous”. There are many such drawings in the four-picture albums purchased by Heinrich Friedrich von Diez (1751-1817) in Constantinople (Diez A fol. 70-73, now preserved in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin) and in the Persianate albums of the Topkapı Palace. These drawings can neither be defined as preparatory studies nor as records of existing works and, presumably, they were not used as book illustrations either. However, can we understand these drawings as “autonomous” – individual artistic creations free of any purpose?To explore this issue, this project examines the conditions underlying the development of independent Persianate drawings around 1400 and seeks to establish inherent formal and thematic criteria of definition. Persian texts about courtly art (workshop reports, album prefaces and parts of chronicles) written from the 15th century onwards will also be analysed in order to establish a differentiated vocabulary for the description and aesthetical valuation of Persianate art, which is primarily line based. The project focusses on carbon ink drawings (qalam siyāhī), as they feature typical characteristics of independent drawings such as weighted lines and reduced, albeit intense, detail drawing inside the contours. Furthermore, the data from a scientific analysis of ca. 70 pictures from the Diez Albums, which revealed in many cases the use of more than one ink within a single drawing, will be systematically evaluated – along with the results of the terminological analysis of Persian sources – in relation to the drawings in the Topkapı Albums. Furthermore, a comparison of these early independent Persianate drawings with single-page drawings that were created at the Safavid and Ottoman courts during the 16th and 17th centuries will provide insight into the transmission of specific motifs and the significance of connoisseurship in the respective periods.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants