page_title: Ibrahim Mirza
section_title: Patron of the arts
hierarchical_section_title: Ibrahim Mirza / Patron of the arts
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Хафт ауранг Джами 1556-65 Фрир Français&#160;: Haft aourang de Djami (Les Sept trônes) Freer Gallery of Art (Washington)
context_page_description: Prince Ibrahim Mirza, Solṭān Ebrāhīm Mīrzā, in full Abu'l Fat'h Sultan Ibrahim Mirza was a Persian prince of the Safavid dynasty, who was a favourite of his uncle and father-in-law Shah Tahmasp I. He is now mainly remembered as a patron of the arts, especially the Persian miniature. Although most of his library and art collection was apparently destroyed by his wife after his murder, surviving works commissioned by him include the manuscript of the Haft Awrang of the poet Jami which is now in the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.
context_section_description: Like other Safavid princes Ibrahim Mirza practiced as a poet, artist and calligrapher, and patronized poets, musicians and other artists, but he was especially important for the atelier he maintained for the production of illuminated manuscripts.  When Tahmasp, previously the leading patron of Persian painting at the time, ceased to commission manuscripts in the 1540s, Ibrahim Mirza's workshop was for a period the most important in Persia. As a poet he wrote several thousand lines, in Persian and Turkish.
  The Freer Jami contains statements by the two calligraphers who copied the text that it was copied at Mashhad, and another source states that one of them, Malik al-Daylami, went with Ibrahim Mirza to Mashhad in 1556, and stayed for 18 months, before being recalled by the shah; he also tutored the prince in calligraphy. Despite requests from the prince he was not allowed back to Mashhad before his death in 1561-62.  The second calligrapher, Shah Mahmud Nishapuri, who had scribed the last major commission of Tahmasp, the Khamsa of Nizami, British Library Or. 2265, died in Mashad in 1564-65.
  There are 28 full-page miniatures, none signed or dated, but modern attributions have been made, not always finding consensus among scholars, to artists including Shaykh Muhammad, an important artist who is recorded joining Ibrahim Mirza in Sabzavar, and after his death returned to working for the shahs.  Shaykh Muhammad may have been responsible for the individualized faces in certain pictures, atypical of Persian painting, and looking forward to the Mughal miniature tradition that was beginning just in these years, as other artists from Tahmasp's atelier joined the service of the Mughal emperor Humayun.  Indeed, one artist, Mirza Ali, is claimed by Stuart Cary Welch and others to have contributed to the Freer Jami, while the theory of Barbara Brend that he was the same person as Abd al-Samad would place him working for Humayun and his son Akbar in just these years, first in Kabul and then in India. Another artist who worked for the prince was Ali Asghar, father of Reza Abbasi, the leading artist of the next generation, who was born around 1565, perhaps at Mashhad.
  Welch suggests that some paintings were made in Qazvin by older artists, such as Aqa Mirak and Muzaffar Ali, who remained there and sent to Mashhad., but the account by another of the prince's calligraphers, Qazi Ahmad, though admittedly full of extravagant praise, makes it clear that Ibrahim Mirza took a good-sized contingent of artists and craftsmen with him to his posts, and spent much time among them.  Other artists working on the manuscript have been given the titles of painters A and D, from their work on earlier manuscripts for Tahmasp. Ibrahim Mirza may also have commissioned manuscripts in Qazvin in the 1570s, the best period of production there.  The miniatures in the book are crowded with figures, and in the example opposite textiles, too much so for many critics,.  It appears Ibrahim Mirza identified himself with Yusuf (Joseph) and the images of him are probably intended as portraits.  The manuscript has been described as "the last truly great one produced under the Safavid dynasty".
  
  For Barbara Brend: 
  Superficially the illustrations to Jami's stories are very similar to those of works for Tahmasp; they are complex compositions of a high level of finish, but there are more figures which are slightly grotesque, more youths with a slightly louche, pussycat smile, and a palette which admits more brown and purple tertiary colours.  The eye is pulled restlessly over the page from detail to detail. It is as though the painters had lost confidence in the power of the ostensible narrative subject to interest the viewer, and were searching for other means to hold the attention.  Innocence had been lost; the classic works would continue to be illustrated, but only as a vehicle for the painters' skill; they seem no longer to have a mythic hold on the imagination.  The future of painting was to lie in more realistic subjects, though their treatment often disguises that re
caption: Majnun in Layla's camp from the Freer Jami, attributed to Shaykh Muhammad
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