These ideas had long-lasting repercussions. In his 1258 compilation
entitledThe Rose Garden,Sa’di of Shiraz (1210–1292) describes the verbal
and the visual as interchangeable in calling his own poetic work“a Chinese
picture gallery, the picture of artang.”^49 Repeating the stories from
Nizami’s Khamsa, the sixteenth-century Persian commentator Dust
Muhammad refers to the images separated by a curtain in the competition
as“two Artangis.”^50 Similarly, the early seventeenth-century chronicler of
calligraphers Qadi Ahmad praises an artist with the diptych,“When he
pictured water on a stone / Anyone who saw it broke his pitcher on it.”^51
The emphasis on allusions to form (in the same Mughal manuscript of
Nizami’sKhamsaas the illustration of Plato at the organ discussed in
Chapter 3.2) underscores both the cultural continuity of the poem and
its reinterpretation in a context of increasing sophistication in painting.
The painting of Mani drawing the dead dog [Plate 8]offers an imaginary
landscape with architecture inspired by European perspectival drawing,
but still replete with the Chinese tradition of painting seen in rocky out-
croppings. Rather than a pond, Mani here appears to draw on a block of
marble, suggesting a palace pool or the plinth under a marble tomb, like
that built for Akbar. The scattering of tools for manuscript painting around
the artist frames him not as foreign, but as a Mughal artist, perhaps a
flattering self-portrait through comparison to Mani. In the foreground,
two hunters carry snares as the one in the foreground turns and looks back
at Mani, who draws the dead dog as numerous animals walk around,
unaware of their proximity to death. The converging narratives offer
multiple meditations on deception. Hunters trap animals to live. Yet
their traps deceive the living, who remain unconscious of death, whether
animal, lounging on the green rolling hills in the foreground, or human,
standing at the battlements of the palace and failing to see Mani. The
composition defends painting as a useful material vessel for the contem-
plation of death and the ephemerality of life before the eternal.
5.3 Jalal al-Din Rumi between the Mirrors and Veils
of ibn Arabi
When Jalal al-Din Rumi retells the story in hisMathnawi, he switches the
artists’identities–the Chinese paint, while the artists of Rum polish.
Although he had migrated from Balkh as a child, he favors the region of
(^49) Soucek, 1972 : 11. (^50) Roxburgh, 2001 : 179. (^51) Minorsky, 2013: 177.
Jalal al-Din Rumi between the Mirrors and Veils of ibn Arabi 149