A folio from the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh, one of the “finest illustrated manuscripts in existence” according to Sotheby’s, is expected to fetch between £4m and £6m at auction next month.
The Shahnameh, also known as the Book of Kings, is an epic poem containing 50,000 rhyming couplets, telling the history of Persia’s rulers. It was written by the Persian poet Ferdowsi between 977 and 1010.
The folio up for auction was made for Shah Tahmasp of Persia in the 16th century. The manuscript was illustrated over the course of two decades by some of the finest artists of the time.
Benedict Carter, head of Sotheby’s Islamic and Indian art department, said the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh was the great version of the manuscript because “it involved such an enormous sense of production, using the greatest artists in the royal atelier”.
Carter said the folio was a “real world masterpiece”, and the only European equivalent would be “if there were to be such a manuscript that was illustrated by all the great Renaissance artists of the age for the ruler”.
The Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp shows the hero Rustam recovering his beloved horse Rakhsh, named for the Persian word for lightning. The folio was painted by Mirza Ali, one of the finest artists of his generation and the son of Sultan Muhammad, one of the greatest of Persian painters, who also worked on the manuscript.
Carter said the folio had a “huge amount of detail” with the image spilling into the margins of the page. “You can get lost in the painting”.
The Shah Tahmasp manuscript was commissioned by emperor Shah Ismail, the founder of the Safavid dynasty of Iran. When he died, his son Shah Tahmasp, just a child at the time, continued to oversee the work. When complete, it was given to Sultan Selim II of the Ottoman empire as a diplomatic gift. Its owners since then have included the Rothschild family.
The record price for any Islamic work on paper is held by a folio from the same manuscript, sold at Sotheby’s in 2011 for £7.4m and now in the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, Canada.
Folios from the Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh are found in the collections of museums including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC, The Nasser D Khalili Collection of Islamic Art in London and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tehran.
The folio will be auctioned as part of Sotheby’s Arts of the Islamic World and India sale on 26 October. Other lots being auctioned in the sale include an illuminated Qur’an, dated from 1575-76, which is estimated to fetch between £400,000-600,000.
