reflection deceives doubly, undermining a premise of a deceptive image by
marginalizing its agency.
Neither artist nor viewer masters deception; rather, the ability of each to
perceive emerges only from the quality of their internal mirrors. Echoing
ibn Sina’s understanding of vision, Nizami Aruzi, a mid-twelfth-century
poet who worked in the Ghaznavid court in Samarkand, describes the
artistic imagination as“a faculty located in the posterior portion of the
anterior ventricle of the brain, which preserves what the Composite Sense
has apprehended from the external senses, so that this remains in it after
the subsidence of the sense-impressions.”^38 Thus the artist does not depict
reality, but records an internalized reality potentially shared through the
perceptual faculty of any sensory recipient.
If artist and viewer are both vessels of reception, then Reality is the agent
impressing itself upon their perception. The painting becomes agent,
creator, and actor; and the artist/viewer becomes the recipient who pre-
pares the stage for reception by polishing the mirror of the heart. The act of
perception becomes one deeply tied to the subjectivity of this recipient,
whose affinity for apprehension relies on the clarity of the mirror. In the
terms offered by Suhrawardi, it is only when the fortress of the body
becomes suspended in the space of the mirror that it can surrender
materiality and become accessed as the real. Within this system, paintings
were designed to“evoke a pious response”rather than functioning as visual
exegesis.^39 Thus the degree to which art is‘Islamic’comes from the culture
of the viewer–their mirror–and not from the object itself.
This position lies in the blind spot of the paradigmatic relationship
normative in European art history. Reflecting on the competition of
Zeuxis as the primal narrative of Western art history, Bryson explains:
“The world [that] painting is to resurrect existsout there, already, in the
plenitude of its Being; and all the image is required to do is approximate as
closely as possible the appearances of that plenary origin.”^40 If we assume,
as in the Sufirendition of the story, that the world as it exists out there is
only a reflection, the opposite of the plenitude of its Being (the Divine), the
role of the image becomes not to approximate appearances, but to reveal
the falseness of this apparent reality as a mere reflection. These worldviews
are mutually exclusive: we cannot understand images conceived through a
worldview of internal mimesis through one based on external mimesis.
The cultural relativism implicit in such a lens is difficult to discern
because this relationship with the physical world frames an attitude toward(^38) Soucek, 1972 : 11. (^39) Rizvi, 2017 :3. (^40) Bryson, 1983 :3.
174 Deceiving Deception