[Music] hello friends welcome back uh tim timmerman here or art professor tim here to talk to you about visual art and how it connects to our principles of the beatitudes that we're going through in this course we are currently at blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy matthew 5 7. so as we continue to uh look at creativity as we continue to work look at empathy and also through a global lens we are going uh to travel uh to persia or uh specifically to uh iran so i'd like you to travel with me
as we look at a work there specifically uh a specific illustration called the bread of mercy and this is an illustration from the mantika turi or conference of birds if you speak arabic sorry that's the best i could do montika alturi i think that's somewhat what it sounds like so uh let's first talk about uh something that's very uh important and a legacy within the islamic tradition of sufism is poetry because actually this all starts with a poet so there's a poet by the name of atar the 12th through the 15th century there is um
a lot of sufi poetry now sufis are the like charismatics of uh islam very spiritually minded and stuff but the 12th through 15th century has some major players that we even know today and we even talk about today like you may have heard of hafiz or specifically roomie is super popular so another one is atar and atar we're specifically taught specifically talking about a lengthy poem he made and uh his work was seen as a little more intellectual sophisticated and uh and his work is still read today the most important work of his is this
one that is on the conference of birds um he was in the 12th century atar was he was well educated in arabic and medicine he was a pharmacist and a perfumist he attended to his patients in his own pharmacy um and the story goes after a very mystical experience he closed his pharmacy and followed a renowned sufi leader so i'd like to start us first with a little bit about the conference of birds so you have an idea of what that's about so uh what you're looking at is what you're looking at is persian safawi
paintings so these are miniature paintings that are illuminated manuscripts so he's writing a long time ago he's writing about 11 42 to 12 20 is the thinking of when he's writing the conference of birds the images i'm going to show you were painted hundreds of years later in basically this they think this the year 1600. so this is a series of illuminated manuscripts that were painted based on these poems so conference of bird crazy stories so basically the general idea for this is um it's a medieval classic in islamic literature and is allegorical in nature
and it's about a group of birds getting together that want to meet the king of birds they're like let's go meet with the king of birds this is going to be great they uh choose a guide among them so if we look at our slide i have of a bunch of birds there there's a bunch of birds they're going to choose a slight a bird among them they choose this bird called uh hupu i'm not kidding um it's uh it's spelled h-o-o-p-o-e but it's called a hoop so they pick the hupu as the king bird
so he is kind of like the sufi mystic of them so a bunch of the birds start complaining saying i don't want to do this i'm busy i don't know you know other things are going on and he basically the hoopoo starts telling allegories or these stories that are metaphors to people and why they make excuses and and other um other reasons why people don't necessarily follow god or pursue god so uh the care he basically the hoop who warns them it's going to be treacherous it's going to be terrible a bunch of them complain
but others stick with it and basically they go through these layers and basically end up in the end of the story but the conference of bird story is basically all these allegories like to the eagle to the egret and it's these metaphors or allegorical tales that are these um like parables or lessons for them to learn all right so then moving on from the overall story of the conference of birds i'd like to talk about a specific image which is called a ruffian spares the life of a poor man this story is actually before it's
like in the prologue before all the parables that are in the conference of birds and the basic story goes like this and here's and the image we're going to be kind of unpacking a lot today so the story goes basically the there's a ruffian which is a brutal person a bully he's not a nice person right he basically um drags this really poor dude home this rach home and his idea is i'm gonna drag this guy home and i'm gonna kill him i'm gonna basically rob him take what he has and then kill him right
but he's about to kill him he's like okay dude i'm gonna kill you and the guy basically has a piece of bread in his hand and he says dude hey where'd you get that bread and he's like your wife gave it to me and he's and and then the ruffian says well okay now i can't kill you because you've broken bread with me you're part of your friend not only of that you're a family member if you broke bread with me so now i'm going to spare your life because i can't kill you because my
wife has fed you how it works often in sufi poetry is multiple characters can represent one thing or one person or a variety of things so it's seen that the ruffian represents kind of the wrath of kind of represents the wrath of god you're going to get it he's drawing a sword if you notice he's going at the guy and the wife represents god's mercy or god's kindness and the wretch himself is none other than the repenting soul who's been dragged utterly destitute and desperate into the court of the just and part of it like
in christian tradition in the islamic tradition the idea is you will be judged you will die and you will be judged and so uh this is this image about this judgment but the key that overlies on this is in the very in this introduction as well there uh it's a ra it's the prologue is constructed around this famous utterance of the prophet muhammad in which god declares my mercy precedes my wrath so this image is an embodiment of that concept of mercy exceeding wrath so let's look at this closely and in detail shall we so
as we dive into the image the main scene takes place in this richly tiled courtyard of the ruffian's two-story house um this was done in the 16th century right or sorry 17th century end of the 16th century so year 1600 and this is what homes in iran could look like like a wealthy home like all these tiles and this elaborate work notice the sense of repetition and we'll talk more about the elements of principle design and play here but but the break-up of the scene too in that um with this fox hunt that's happening there's
a fox chasing a rabbit right above the door so here we have the wife with her bread she has the one broken piece of bread and then two whole pieces of bread here a servant girl is exiting the um house and she's like oh my gosh like because she's just come in on what's going on and then there's another gentleman at the top left that is looking down on these image it down on the image part of the idea of that was it's a liminal space those figured there's three figures we'll talk about another one
in a moment that are neither outside nor inside they're in between and if you're being judged at the throne of god you're in between you're not in heaven you're not in hell you're not in earth right you're in between and so there's these three figures that kind of hold this sense of liminal space they're not outside they're not inside they're both places right so let's look a little closer at the upper right hand corner there's a huntsman in white that's about to shoot two turtle doves that are like in in kind of a circle the
background is gold it's actually gold leaf and then there's this element of um greenery or these two trees and flowering bushes that are off to the right as well at the very top there's what's called an isometric perspective so unlike western thought the perspective is multiple perspectives in one image so we have multiple roofs and things are kind of tilted funny the idea of that actually being in perspective isn't of interest to them this would be very traditional in i want to say middle east and all asian countries is isometric perspective and this kind of
multi-perspectives in one image but if you notice the right-hand uh side there's smoke coming out of the um uh chimney uh the thinking with that is you bake bread and it causes smoke so the smoke is a symbol of the baking bread and we'll talk a little bit more about that in a moment but let's go to the central like dynamic scene that's happening in the very big at the very center of things if you notice there's a servant the servant has tied up the poor man with like a little red rope and he's on
his knees just pleading the ruffian has drawn his sword he's ready to go it's out of its uh sheath he's moving right the wife is just busy with her bread but the ruffian's holding the second half of the other bread um which uh is uh like hey look your wife just gave this to me right so and the ruffian we're in the image where the ruffian has just noticed that um piece of bread so we're in this moment of tension of the ruffians just about to kill him right so moving to the bigger picture again
let me point out some interesting things there's a curious element of the hunt that's playing out with these right there's the image of the fox chasing the rabbit there's the image of the man with the bow and arrow about to shoot the birds and then there's the image of the ruffian about to kill the poor man right it's this moment right before things happen the birds haven't been shot the rabbit hasn't been killed so the some of the writing on this talks about there's kind of it's pointing in a sense like it's inevitable it's inevitable
this guy's going to be judged and killed right it's inevitable those birds are going to shout if you get shot it's inevitable that the fox is going to catch the rabbit but in god's mercy which precedes his wrath it's not inevitable right here also ties in the smoke from that chimney because that smoke as traditional in islamic as well as christian is prayer right so this connective element of the hopes and prayers of the people and in a sense that god's wrath has already been appeased that bread has already been made that is already taken
care of god's wrath has already been uh has been taken care of and there's mercy and god's mercy is represented in bread you know i just thought this right now that's interesting i'm thinking of communion for us right the idea of bread anyway uh it all connects right so let's let's keep talking here um i'd like to talk a little bit about some of the compositional elements so if you notice there's three main characters i've drawn a little green line to show you those three main characters that function in a triangle i was using my
track pad and my finger on these so don't think gosh tim can't draw a straight line i was doing my best it was going like this so anyway so there's the three figures right but in the center of the three figures are the three loaves so it's a triangle within a triangle so in terms of a composition this helps kind of connect and also focus us it like hones us in like a target but it's not the only triangle there's a triangle at the top the red one i've drawn or pink one showing you the
connection of the three liminal characters the characters that are moving outside that are on the inside right so they're another triangle so in a sense there's almost like an ir out ah i just learned to speak yesterday there's an hourglass composition with the image and uh and how they connect so looking closely at the details here's just some close-ups so you can see them as well as the smoke coming out of the chimney that represents the prayers and such the the visual attention to the details in this image are just absolutely phenomenal so i want
to take a little more time uh kind of diving into this image in terms of the elements used in design in it so it has a limited palette uh meaning it's not every color in the rainbow right there's kind of a really warm element to it within these soft greens and blues there's a lot of repetition so shapes that repeat themselves all over and then variation of that so slight tweaks to them be it even just the different angles that we're seeing and there's also something called visual linking so i'm going to totally play with
you and show you some visual linking so let's see how there's a gigantic x that happens in this piece to the figures so our two triangles connect and end up making a gigantic x and then if we draw a line through there we can see the cemetery in the image but what's really nice is the the painter of this has made it asymmetrical to make it more interesting so added that garden scene that's off to the right which is really quite lovely also if we look at uh visual linking specifically on who's looking at who
this is uh tim maybe had a little too much fun with the thing so all right we have the guy in the upper window on the left he's looking down to the woman coming out of the door or is it or is he looking at the other servant because there's a nice diagonal there okay dude shooting the birds are looking at the birds right the woman is looking at the um ruffian the also looking at the ruffian is the servant also looking at the ruffian is the uh poor man right and in the very center
we have this woman entering out and engaging with us looking at us also we have the two birds looking at one another so there's these two little rings kind of happening within the image visual linking is moving us throughout the image right and we tend to look if a character is looking somewhere we're gonna look where that character is looking i think that's pretty curious in it i want to show you some other pages from the conference of birds actually if you go to the metropolitan museum of art go to the link that's included within
this course too and you can totally zoom in and look at these they're really quite lovely because this is the center guys this is super curious you know how big this painting is that we've been looking at this big yes it's whoops upside down it's four and a half by seven and three quarter inches so i'd like you just keep in mind the minute detail look back at the image we were just looking at the crazy minute detail and these images i'm showing you as well here the multiple images from uh the conference of birds
they're this big these people must be working with like a one hair brush right but this is a tradition within the islamic communities this is persian miniatures it was uh um a tradition within that community so what i wanted to point out is it's a tradition that has not necessarily ended uh here's a contemporary artist of pakistani artist shazia sikander and some of her contemporary work these are tiny as well so she she uses the miniature uh style as something to work off of within her homework and then another image i have for you is
showing her working and how tiny her paintings are i love what she said in this interview that also will also include in the links to this uh specific week in this course is um she loves uh islamic miniatures because they possess complex geometry intricate stylization rigor detail stacked up perspective geometric patterns and all of them are a stalemate there is no release but 500 years later these works are still heroic in scope and i love that they're they are heroic it's i see the work as a map in work in which history passes so hopefully
in our image here of the bread of mercy that we've taken some time to unpack um it is a map that we're able to maybe look at what god's mercy can look like and our belief too that god is a god of mercy and that god's mercy does precede his wrath and just a curious work of art and i've had a delightful time honestly learning more about persian miniatures and i don't know about you this makes me want to get to the museum and look at a bunch of these in person so thanks
