This looks like a really cool book:
>>Imperial Eden Lies at the End of a Quest for Illuminated Paintings
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
WASHINGTON, May 1 — For 40 years Milo C. Beach has been
obsessed by a book. Not just any book, but possibly the most important
work of imperial Mogul art in the world.
The Moguls were the Persian-speaking Muslim conquerors of India, and "The Rose
Garden Album" (or "Moraqqa- e Golshan") is a courtly volume of dazzling
illuminated paintings and calligraphy made for the 17th-century Emperor Jahangir.
But for most of the last 40 years Mr. Beach, the director of the Arthur M. Sackler
Gallery and the Freer Gallery of Art here, could only imagine what the manuscript
looked like. When the Persian ruler Nader Shah sacked Delhi in 1739, he took the
manuscript with him back to Persia. Most of the manuscript sits in the 19th-century
Golestan Palace in south Tehran, where it had been jealously guarded and for the
most part kept from public view ever since.
So Mr. Beach, 61, combed scholarly works to locate errant pages that had been
ripped out over the years and given or sold to the West. Magnifying glasses in hand,
he studied decades-old photographs of the pages, using them to write scholarly
articles.
Then in a stunning agreement last fall between the Iranian government and the
Sackler, Mr. Beach received permission to help put the 300-page manuscript in
order and produce a museum-quality facsimile. The task is so monumental that it
triggered his decision to retire next fall after 17 years as director of the galleries, the
Smithsonian Institution's two museums of Asian Art.<<
More at
nytimes.com |
