There was no difference in either form or color. The viewers stood in amazement,
unable tofind an explanation. How could both the young‘Manis’have created the
same‘Artang’? The king sat between the two paintings and looked at them, but
could also see no difference. He also could not immediately solve the riddle.
However much he thought about it, the truth remained hidden for him.
Nonetheless, there was a difference: one image gave offa shine; the other, captured
it.
But as the wise [Alexander] observed the two images and the idolatrously
beautiful forms, the incident seemed to him unprecedented. It left him no peace,
and he meditated until hefigured it out. He ordered the curtain to be closed again,
and as soon as the he separated the vault, one of the paintings disappeared, but the
other shone. The Rum drawing held its painting and its colors, but the Chinese one
was rusted. The disappearance of the image on the Chinese wallfilled the ruler with
wonder. He lifted then curtain up again, and the same picture appeared anew. Then
he knew that the shining niche had been polished and the painting was reflected in
it. As they had worked, the artists of Rum had painted, while the Chinese had
polished. And everything that one wall had captured in painting, the other offered
through its reflection. The competition was resolved as follows: each side had been
advised by insight. Nobody understood painting as the artists of Rum, but in
polishing were the Chinese the masters.^26
Understood as a metaphor for rhetorical practices as well as mimesis,
Nizami’s rendition equalizes the value of knowledge acquired through
reason and intuition by emphasizing their interdependence.
Although the poetry describes the act of painting, it does not describe the
image. This is left to artists illustrating it, as in a detached manuscript page
from the mid-fifteenth century familiarizing the scene through a contem-
porary setting showing wall painting at the Timurid court.^27 [Plate 7]It
depicts a royal hunting scene in which retainers, one of whom holds aflask,
sit at the top of the scene, looking upon the hunting ground where the
mounted ruler has already decapitated a lion and killed a deer. Thefigures
in the center, seated in front of a window indicating a tree with cherry
blossoms outside and under a curtain, indicate wonder withfingers at their
lips. They look at the mirror, which exceeds the image by replacing its
(^26) Nizami, 1991 : 289. Like many scholars, Bürghel translates Rum as“griechisch.”Implicitly
associating“Greek”with the modern state of Greece and, by extension with Europe and the
Western appropriation of antiquity, this translation ignores the conflated connotations of Rum
as both contemporary Greek speakers in (formerly) Eastern Roman territories and as authors of
ancient philosophical texts inherited by the Islamic world. Neither the Chinese nor the Rum
were alien to the Islamic hegemonic world. Rather, they function as semi-internal tropes
between which the self emerges.
(^27) Lentz, 1993.
Nizami, the Paintings of Mani, and the Mirrors of Suhrawardi 141