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Pastimes : Book Nook -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (269)	5/9/2001 11:21:16 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 443

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