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There
was talk the other day about
the acuteness of observation, and the creative reading of works of art,
that comes naturally to some that belong to our own small tribe of art
historians. And an instance was cited by a colleague. He spoke of a
painting from the celebrated copy of Firdausi’s Shahnama –
that great text that looms so large in the Persian-speaking world –
which belonged once to Shah Tahmasp of Persia. In that work, the artist
renders the scene of Zal, a mythical ruler, abandoned at birth by his
parents as an inauspicious baby because of his white hair, being adopted
by a simurgh, that fabled bird of magnificent plumage, and carried to
his nest for nurturing. The painting is most delicately made, the eye
getting lost in the intricate detail of landscape and foliage that the
artist brings in. Somewhere in the same painting, high up in a tree, the
simurgh is seen landing in his nest with this new-found baby. We had all
seen the painting, this colleague said, but it was Stuart Cary Welch,
connoisseur of Mughal and Persian painting, who first seized upon the
detail of what was happening in that little nest: there, as he has
pointed out in an essay, a drama is unfolding with the simurgh’s own
young ones looking with bewilderment and dismay at this new arrival that
their parent has brought in from nowhere to share their food and the
warmth of their nest! Talk turned to the insistent presence of the
simurgh in Persian painting, and the incredible flair with which this
winged creature of fantasy is rendered by the artists: dazzling plumage,
keen eye, tail taking in its sweep whole mountain tops as it flies at
dizzying heights. No one has seen a simurgh, for it lives only in minds
and visions, but it is as if just visualising the great bird somehow
releases the painters’ imagination. The simurgh is of course not a
denizen of the Persian world alone, nor is it the only fantastic
creature that one comes upon in art or myth: there are countless others.
And with each of them one enters the twilight but exciting world of the
surrealist unknown, the ‘antipodes of the mind’ as it has been
called. It is there that these figments of the imagination reside,
raising visions, challenging beliefs, tapping the veins of fear, sowing
seeds of distrust in the reality of the visible world. But also,
sometimes, giving birth to hope. Take the phoenix, for instance. A
fabulous bird that originated in Arabia, in most Greek and Roman
accounts, it has remained the quintessential symbol of hope, and of
regeneration, for, as myths go, after its death the great bird rises
from its own ashes to live again. Before its death, however, it makes an
appearance in the human world heralding a great event that is about to
happen. In the Bible, it finds repeated mention (the Book of
Job, xxix, 18; Psalms xcii, 12), and in Early Christian and
Medieval art it appears again and again as a symbol of Christ’s
resurrection. The ancients of the Roman world believed that the bird is
a denizen of Arabia and lives for close to 500 years, Pliny giving its
exact span of life, in fact: 540 years. When it dies, the historian
added, it is in his own sweet-smelling nest where the new phoenix is
formed from its bones and marrow. In China and Japan, they used to say
that it dwells in paulownia trees, eats bamboo seeds, and has feathers
of five colours. In that part of the world, till as late as the
nineteenth century, there were learned debates about its existence or
not. But, fabled or not, it was seen as the King of Birds, appearing
when a sage of great significance was about to be born. Not each time
that it appears in art is it to be interpreted as signifying a great
coming event, for it turns simply into a much loved decorative motif ,
especially in the art of the Far East: on palace walls, carpets,
porcelain vases, bronze ritual vessels, gold hairpins. Not every
creature of fantasy that one sees in the world of art has a specific
name. Or at least one that has survived. But some of them take one’ s
breath away because of the panache and the firmness with which they are
rendered. Like the winged figures that appear in the form of reliefs on
walls in Iraq as early as the 9th century before Christ, for
example. In the Denver Art Museum, there is a limestone fragment of one
of these creatures, half-human, half-bird. As we see him standing,
magnificently attired, wearing a rich bejewelled crown on his head, long
hooked beak, all-knowing eye, holding in one raised, claw-like hand some
unidentified object, we sense the power and the majesty of the figure.
It is as if he had descended from an unknown world for fulfilling some
divine, pre-ordained task. In this context, one also thinks naturally
of fabled figures that crowd the pages of our own myths, and live in our
art: the great sun-bird Garuda, vahana of Vishnu, for instance; the
navagunjara, all those ihamrigas and gajasimhas of sculptural art. But
of those another time, perhaps. |
