Art of the Mirage

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY Isfahan was more than a city--it was a dream. Travellers marvelled at its mosques and bazaars, which nothing in Europe could rival, and many a drafty northern castle was adorned with the glowing carpets for which Isfahan was renowned. Shah Abbus and The of Isfahan, at the Fogg until February 24, recreates the magic of the fabled Persian city with a rich and varied collection of beautiful objects from tomb covers to archer's rings.

Isfahan's artistic flowering began with the reign of the energetic Shah Abbas I, who made it his capital. As Anthony Welch explains in his excellent catalogue, Shah Abbas transformed the traditional Persian arts, previously the province of a tiny, cultivated elite, into a more widely based, commercially successful venture. He was a generous patron, who took a personal interest in the production of anything that added to the glory of his reign. Isfahan was so completely his creation that his corrupt successors did not significantly change the outward shape of his society. Yet their dissipation ate away at its heart. Isfahan's essential weakness was betrayed when the city fell to an illassorted Afghan army in 1722, bringing to an end an era that had always been too dazzling to be quite real.

NEARLY EVERYTHING in the exhibition has a shimmering insubstantiality to it. A pale orange silk prayer rug with silver and green blossoms, which may have belonged to the Shah himself, looks as if it would have crumbled to dust if he had ever knelt on it. Though they are lethal weapons, his damascened swords and daggers are inlaid with golden flowers and lines of flowing script. The astrolabe looks more like an extravagantly ingenious toy than a working navigation instrument. Even the coins of Isfahan look too pretty to spend.

The best and most genuine pieces in the show are the small drawings, perhaps because they don't try to serve any purpose beyond pleasing the eye. The taut elegance of Sadiqi Bek's Lion Tamer and the grace of Riza's A Young Man in a Blue Cloak prove that these two were artists of the first rank. And the drawings of Mu'in Musavvir, Riza's most gifted student, are delightful. His Squatting Camel is not to be missed.

Taken chronologically, the drawings could be read as a footnote to the history of the decay of the Safavi dynasty. Riza joined the royal atelier soon after Shah Abbas ascended the throne. His earliest drawings are delicate, strongly traditional, and faintly wistful, obviously the work of a young prodigy. Later, toward the end of Shah Abbas's reign, his touch coarsens and he no longer draws graceful, languid young men. Instead, he caricatures raunchy, dope-smoking soldiers like Nashmi the Archer--an archetype of social decay. Riza's protege, Mu'in Musavvir, did original work in the traditional Persian style throughout his long life, in the face of many of his contemporaries's adoption of a European manner. Muhammad Zaman, for example, based his Return from the Flight Into Egypt on a Flemish engraving after Rubens. By the time he died, just before the fall of the dynasty, Mu'in was the only significant traditional artist left. Persian painting had been exposed to a variety of new influences, but the social fabric was too weak to support the emergence of a genuine fusion of the old and the new in art.

THE SEEDS of the dynasty's artistic disintegration had been sown at the very beginning of the century. From the first, as Professor Welch comments, seventeenth century Persian art relied more for its effect on the brilliance of its surface than on the soundness and originality of its conception. Just as the magnificence of Shah Abbas's public buildings masked the growing corruption of the society they glorified, the gold leaf and arabesques of Isfahan's art too often hid hackneyed ideas and careless workmanship. Isfahan fades like a mirage when you try to touch it. Yet, seen from the right distance, the dreamlike perfection of the surface almost makes up for the emptiness behind.