WORLD ART

One of the world’s finest collections of Persian manuscripts and miniature paintings. Adel Adamova is a curator at the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Manijeh Bayani is a specialist in Persian epigraphy, based in London.

450 colour illustrations 27.6 x 21.9cm 552pp paperback ISBN 978 0 500 970683 June £29.95

Persian Painting

New in paperback

The Arts of the Book and Portraiture Adel T. Adamova and Manijeh Bayani 58

This is a luxuriously illustrated study of more than 40 extraordinary Persian miniature paintings, illuminated manuscripts and elaborately decorated bookbindings in The al-Sabah Collection, Kuwait, dating from the 11th century CE to the early 20th century. It includes rare examples from the pre-Mongol invasion period; fine illuminations of Qur’an manuscripts; Mu’nis al-Ahrar, an important early 14th-century anthology by Muhammad ibn Badr al-Din al-Jajarmi; material from dispersed manuscripts of Firdawsi’s Shah-nameh; two previously unpublished copies of Qazwini’s ‘Aja’ib al-Makhluqat; three copies of Nizami’s Khamsah; Sa‘di’s Golestan; and Jami’s Yusuf and Zulaykha and Subhat al-Abrar – as well as paintings from dispersed Safavid and post-Safavid albums, and 17th-century bookbindings and oil paintings from the Zand and Qajar periods.