A single sheet from The Shahnameh – or ‘Book of Kings’ – is expected to fetch between £4-6 million at Sotheby’s, as part of the Arts of The Islamic World & India London auction, which will be held on 26 October 2022. The high estimate of the folio is due to both the rarity and quality of the work: this Shahnameh is one of the finest illustrated manuscripts of all time, covering the greatest epic of Persian literature with 50,000 rhyming couplets.
The Shahnameh tells the story of all Persia’s rulers, beginning from the country’s myths. The text was written by the author Firdausi and completed in 1010. From the moment of its completion, the epic became a touchstone of Iranian royalty, drawing all princes henceforth to commission their own illustrated version of the book. The folio at auction comes from the most prestigious iteration of the manuscript, illustrated for Shah Tahmsp of Persia (r.1524-76), the second Shah of Safavid Iran. It took two decades and an estimated 15 artists of the royal family to illustrate it, resulting in what is now one of the greatest works on paper in the world.
The folio offered depicts the hero of the story, Rustam, recovering his horse Rakhsh, named after the Persian word for 'lightning'.
The manuscript boasts an impressive provenance since the very moment it was commissioned: first ordered by the emperor Shah Ismail and completed by his son Shah Tahmasp, it was then gifted to Sultan Selim II of the Ottoman Empire. It later ended up in the hands of the Rothschild family, known as one of the greatest bibliographic collectors of modern times. Arthur A. Houghton, who founded the Houghton Library at Harvard, was the first Western collector to buy the entire manuscript, although in a controversial move, he ended up disbounding the volume so that its pages could be exhibited separately. Many of the separate folios are now housed in international museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Smithsonian in Washington DC, The Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art in London, The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha and many more.
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“The Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp is a perfect encapsulation of artistic skill, patronage and beauty – universally acknowledged as one of the supreme illustrated manuscripts of any period or culture and ranking among the greatest works of art in the world. The record for any Islamic work on paper is held by a folio from the same manuscript, sold at Sotheby’s in 2011, and so the rare appearance of another at auction represents a great opportunity for collectors in this field and beyond”, commented Benedict Carter, the Head of Department at Sotheby’s Islamic & Indian Art.
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The manuscript has been likened to Dante’s Divine Comedy, if it had been illustrated by the great Western artists such as Michelangelo or Titian. The 2011 folio from this same manuscript sold for £7.4 million, and since folios from this version of The Shahnameh rarely come up on the market, this auction is likely to find equal, if not greater, success.
