For him Persain painting coincides with a truly contemporary vision of the arts, for it gives every observer of its masterpieces the right to choose his or her own interpretation and to transform what is discovered into a personal world. Grabar argues that the art of miniature painting is one specifically for the court and princely patron. It is a private secular art, hidden within the sumptuous covers of a book, never intended for general consumption, and deliberately designed to demonstrate the owner’s wealth and power.
In the early period, it was only a generously funded workshop that could afford the tools of manufacture — paper, gold, silver, lapis lazuli — and the organization to co-ordinate the skills of the many people involved that it was possible to produce the books at all.
Mostly Miniature: An Introduction to Persian Painting; vii
Oleg Grabar
Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000
168 pp.
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