Composite Camel with Attendant

Composite Camel with Attendant

In the third quarter of the sixteenth century, an increase in the number of single-page paintings and drawings produced in Iran reflected a broadening of patronage and a decline in the preference for illustrated manuscripts. Additionally, subject matter shifted from the heroic to the lyrical, with genre scenes and portraiture gaining importance. A painting such as this, depicting a young groom leading a camel composed of human and fantastic creatures and bedecked with fancy textiles, combines the genre type with the suggestion of a mystical meaning. On the basis of style—particularly, the round face, long neck, and slender body of the groom—the painting can be attributed to Khurasan and dated to the 1570s or 1580s.

A late fifteenth-century prototype, attributed to the Timurid master Bihzad, depicts a groom spinning wool on a spindle while leading a camel.[1] Even if the artist of the present work was unaware of Bihzad’s painting, he may have been familiar with a Safavid image of the same subject, signed by the court artist Shaikh Muhammad.[2] Couplets concerning taming the haughty camel, composed by the artist, appear in the border of that painting. While the work under consideration here differs from Shaikh Muhammad’s painting in style and in details of the groom and camel, the general subject matter and composite makeup of the camel suggest that both artists were responding to a similar mystical impulse. Even if the artist here was inspired by Shaikh Muhammad’s work or a copy of it, he has misunderstood the animal’s trappings, transforming the metal bar that arches over the front of a camel’s hump into a tear-shaped standard with bells on it. Likewise, the shape of the cloth covering the hump bears no relation to the form of either the hump or a saddle.[3]

Although composite animals have figured throughout the history of Iranian art, they enjoyed a notable revival in the last third of the sixteenth century. Unlike the harpies and sphinxes of medieval Iranian art, composites under the Safavids consisted of humans, real and fantastic animals, and demons (divs) combined into the shape of known animals such as horses and camels. These were especially favored in Khurasan, the northeast province of Iran, which encompasses the cities of Mashhad and Herat. In addition to the painting by Shaikh Muhammad, a key work for the understanding of this image is an illustrated Hadiqat al-haqiqat (The Walled Garden of Truth) of Sana’i, a mystical poet of the eleventh–twelfth century, that contains four illustrations of composite animals.[4] In the simplest terms, the composite aspect of the animals alludes to the mystical idea of the unity of all creatures within God, while the animals themselves represent base instincts that must be overcome to achieve spiritual purity.

Sheila R. Canby in [Ekhtiar, Soucek, Canby, and Haidar 2011]

Footnotes:

1. Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (no. F1937.22).

2. Dickson and Welch 1981, vol. 1, pp. 167–68.

3. An unfinished drawing of a composite camel and groom in mirror reverse is a copy, probably from a pounce, of this image. It is in album H2162 in the Topkapı Palace Library, illustrated on ARTstor, without further identifying numbers. A painting in the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., reproduces the Metropolitan Museum’s composite camel, but both the landscape background and the pose of the groom who looks back at the camel differ from the Metropolitan’s example. See Simpson, Marianna Shreve. Arab and Persian Painting in the Fogg Art Museum. Fogg Art Museum Handbooks, 2. Cambridge, Mass., 1980, pp. 80–81.

4. The male figures in these illustrations wear Indian turbans, but the pictorial style is consistent with that of Khurasan. The manuscript contains four other illustrations: one appears to be by a Bukhara artist, and the other three conform to the Khurasan style. Possibly the manuscript traveled from Iran to India via Bukhara. Karin Ruhrdanz, in Das endlose Rätsel: Dalí und die Magier der Mehrdeutigkeit. Exhibition, Museum Kunst Palast, Düsseldorf. Catalogue by Jean-Hubert Martin, Stephan Andreae, and Uta Husmeier. Düsseldorf, 2003, p. 99, mentiones two manuscripts of Sana’i’s Hadiqat al-haqiqat, one from 1569, copied in Herat, and the other from 1573, with composite images.

George D. Pratt, New York (until 1925; gifted to MMA)

Venice. Fondazione Giorgio Cini. "Miniature Islamiche dal XIII al XIX Secolo," 1962, no. 70.

Palm Beach, FL. The Society of the Four Arts. "Loan to the Society of the Four Arts, Palm Beach, Fl," February 2, 1962–February 27, 1962, no catalogue.

New York. The Hagop Kevorkian Special Exhibitions Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Nature of Islamic Ornament, Part IV: Figural Representation," September 16, 1999–January 30, 2000, no catalogue.

Dimand, Maurice S. "Oriental Miniatures." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin vol. 20 (1925). pp. 125, 127.

Grube, Ernst J. "from Collections in the United States and Canada." In Muslim Miniature Paintings from the XIII to XIX Century. Venice: N. Pozza, 1962. no. 70, pp. 91–92, ill. pl. 70 (b/w).

Grube, Ernst J. "The Early School of Herat and its Impact on Islamic Painting of the Later 15th, the 16th and 17th Centuries." In The Classical Style in Islamic Painting. Venice: Edizioni Oriens, 1968. ill. pl. 44 (b/w).

Dickson, Martin, and Stuart Cary Welch. The Houghton Shahnameh. Vol. vols. I & II. Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: Harvard University Press, 1981. vol. 1, pp. 167–68.

Dali und die Magier der Mehrdeutigkeit. Düsseldorf`, 2003. p. 160, ill. (color).

"Dali und die Magier der Mehrdeutigkeit (Dali and the magicians of multiple meaning)." In Das Endlose Ratselm (The Endless Enigma). Düsseldorf: Museum Kunstpalast, 2003. p. 160, ill. (color).

Ekhtiar, Maryam, Priscilla P. Soucek, Sheila R. Canby, and Navina Haidar, ed. Masterpieces from the Department of Islamic Art in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 1st ed. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011. no. 142, pp. 214–15, ill. p. 215 (color).