Representing Ming China in Fifteenth-Century Persianate Painting

Abstract

This article preliminarily analyzes a corpus of fifteenth-century Persianate paintings preserved in the Topkapi and Diez albums. It investigates the album paintings as the pictorial evidence to the Persianate first-hand encounter with Ming China. The paintings feature their emphasis on physiognomic verisimilitude of the painted figures and faithful description of their props and clothing. As a totality, they formulate the proto-ethnographic knowledge on China in the Persianate consciousness of this period. The last section on the representation of Chinese beauty, on the other hand, shows how pre-existing stereotyped imagination merged with the first-hand observation.