Calligraphic Line

In late Timurid manuscript painting, the area devoted to the illustration of the story narrated in the manuscript shrank dramatically, while a multitude of non-illustrative forms proliferated. Painting became filled with figures and motifs that bore no apparent relationship to the surrounding text. This chapter argues that visual abundance destabilized illustration in order to reference taswir, the process of image making. Aspects of composition and technique such as the painting’s even surface and its grid-like composition further lauded the artist’s creative power. This chapter also shows that painting became a metamedium, designed to interrogate the ontological boundaries of painting and to define its relationship, not to the world as we see it but to God’s creation, to the ideal forms and concepts from which reality was created. As such painting represented potential, rather than actual, worlds.