The Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353

by Linda Komaroff (Editor), Stefano Carboni (Editor)

In the thirteenth century, under the leadership of Genghis Khan, nomadic horsemen burst out of Mongolia and began their sweep across Asia. During the century they ruled Iran--the period of the Ilkhanid dynasty (1256-1353)--the Mongols adopted Islam and sponsored a brilliant cultural flowering. This splendid volume features some two hundred extraordinary objects in color. Essays by eight eminent scholars provide the historical and political background.

Genres: Art

424 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

Reviews

[Bryn Hammond · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have now pored over every page, although I haven’t ‘finished’ as this book is an ongoing learning experience (and makes me want to do Art History).

I won’t try to distil its contents. Instead I’ll just quote a passage on the most characteristic art of Mongol Iran, and closest to our hearts on this site: the art of the book.

“The team of masters who worked on [the Great Mongol Shahnama] forged, with intuitive mutual understanding, a new style. But that style was less important in itself than for what it attempted to convey, for it embraced depths of meaning and expression hitherto unknown in Islamic book painting. So ambitious were these artists that they effectively broke the bounds of the medium, taking book art into areas for which it was perhaps unsuited and from which their successors recoiled. Within the covers of this book, one can trace the sequence from paintings that are simple illustrations to ones that are commentaries, then metaphors, and finally independent works of art operating confidently on several levels of meaning. More and more content – descriptive, emotional, historical, symbolic – is gradually pumped into these paintings, and only an absolutely assured command of pictorial language enables the greatest of these painters to control the forces that they unleash.”

The Great Mongol Shahnama is otherwise known as the Demotte Shahnama, after the arts dealer who cut up these 18 inch by 12 inch pages to sell the pictures piecemeal. Let’s not call it after him, except that his name helps you Google images. Unfortunately, far from every item in this book is on the internet, that I’ve found.

&&&

Not just an exhibition catalogue but among the most important Mongol books published lately. I understand that art historians have been at the forefront of cultural study of the Mongol world (in advance of other fields, I gather). To quote a recent bibliographical survey:

Art historians have long acknowledged the Mongol period as one of unique flourishing... the various magnificent recent exhibitions that portrayed Mongol material and visual culture have done much to improve the Mongols' images in the popular opinion. Of special importance are the exhibition catalog of The Legacy of Genghis Khan, ed. by Komaroff and Carboni (2002), and the symposium that followed the exhibition, published as Beyond the Legacy of Chinggis Khan, (ed. L. Komaroff, 2006), which suggests various new directions for the study of Ilkhanid cultural and artistic history. --Michal Biran, 'The Mongol Empire in World History: The State of the Field', a great short survey of what's happening in Mongol research, that you can view in PDF here:
http://mongol.huji.ac.il/sites/defaul...

More when I finish this splendid book.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone remotely interested in Mongols, Iran, the Ilkhanate, or art should see about adding this big helpful beauty to their collection ASAP.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

i was interested to learn that this man was not the blood-thirsty maniac that many of us have painted in our minds. there was method (albeit bloody) to his madness and some of his policies were truly visionary. not bad for someone who was totally illiterate.

[Jbondandrews · Rating 4 out of 5]

The items featured in the book are amazing. Its just a pity the majority of the items are in European and American museums instead of museums in the countries where they were found.

[Tim Poston · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book stuck on my "currently reading" for a long time, because it is _not_ a page turner. As a picture book it would deserve five stars, but the essays ... ! They have all the vices of academic writing, such as convoluted sentences, avoidance of the first person even when appropriate, and heavy overuse of the passive.

More substantively, the writers are snobs. Like literary theorists who pay attention only to Great Writers (ignoring the works those writers read, which certainly influenced them, particularly when growing up), this is only about luxury goods. Textiles (never "cloth" — too few syllables) of the court, with no clue about what lesser people wore: surely a more important context than cloth generations ago or thousands of miles away. Similarly for painting, ceramics, and books.

The articles are very selectively technical. We get details of the paints used in the book illustration "Nushirvan eating the food brought by the sons of Mahbud", but nothing about Nushirvan, Mahbud, or the food. (Poisoned, perhaps? You need to look elsewhere for authors who care about the _text_ of the Great Mongol Shahnama, and will discuss the story ... which mattered to the writer and readers.) We get great detail of the firing techniques and glazes of the ceramics. But for cloth, in articles discussing the common motifs with tiles, we get not even the thread count or the breadth. These matter to the social context, because higher numbers require more skill and heavier apparatus to weave. The Mongol conquerors were nomads, with only portable looms. When they slaughtered everyone in a city, sparing only the artisans, did they include the weavers of the more affordable cloth? The potters who made common cups? We are not told, and the authors seem not to have asked the question.

I am glad I read this book, when I finally propped it up at the dining table, and read it bit bit. But I will not read it again.