A large calligraphic panel with two lines in the style of the 'Baysunghur' Qur'an

Persia, 19th/20th Century

Footnotes

Provenance
The Shakerine Collection.

Text
Qur'an, sura XL, Ghafir, verse 18-the beginning of verse 20.


This large panel copies closely lines from the 'Baysunghur' Qur'an of circa 1400, a monumental manuscript associated with the Timurid prince Baysunghur ibn Shahrukh, though some argue for a closer association with Timur himself. The complete pages which survive measure 177 x 101 cm. It was apparently dismembered by Nadir Shah's troops when they captured Samarqand in the 18th Century. Pages or fragments of pages are now in, for example, the Gulistan Library and the National Library of Iran, Tehran; the Metropolitan Museum, New York; The David Collection, Copenhagen.

A great deal of attention and reverence was accorded during the Qajar dynasty to the original Timurid manuscript, in part because many of the original Timurid pages were dispersed or damaged during the 19th Century, or were heavily restored. As a result of their dispersion in more than one site in Persia (including Quchan and Mashhad), a desire to have similar exercises of monumental calligraphy started to take hold in the late 19th Century, leading to the production of pages imitating the original Timurid version. For an example of a single line from a replacement page produced in the 19th Century, see Sotheby's, Arts of the Islamic World, 25th October 2017, lot 55.

The Nasser D. Khalili Collection possesses a section of the original 'Baysunghur' Qur'an, as well as two Qajar pages, dated circa 1880-1920 (see D. James, After Timur: Qur'ans of the 15th and 16th Centuries, London 1992, pp. 24-25, nos. 2 and 3. For a history and discussion of the 'Baysunghur' Qur'an and its later replacements and imitations, see pp. 18-23).

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