‘Chinese’ Paper and Margins of Gold in a Fifteenth-Century Shiraz Anthology

Abstract

AbstractWithin the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, is a small, but especially interesting anthology of Persian poetry. Although the manuscript's colophon is missing, the stylistic evidence of its badly damaged illustrations and illuminations indicates that it was produced in Shiraz in the 1430s or 1440s. The discussion considers two unusual features of the manuscript, the first of which is that seven folios of a type of paper, generally thought to be of Chinese manufacture, are included among its 171 folios of otherwise Islamic paper. As is typical of this so-called Chinese paper, the folios are coloured—in this case an olive green—and one is decorated with a gold painted design of what appears to be an immature fruit of some sort, along with lobed leaves on a curling vine. Equally intriguing are the scenes and patterns, painted exclusively in gold, that fill the margins of the folios throughout the manuscript. No other such margins are known in any other contemporary manuscript.