The other for the play of his imagination.
Thus the heart of the envious painter was broken;
And in despair he sat down in the corner of affliction.^27
The reluctance toward theorization through images in Islamic art history
has led this painting to be interpreted only by the art historian James
Elkins: [Plate 9]
It is a wonderful story, with its metaphors of blindness and insight, but the
painting that accompanies it in one manuscript may come as a disappointment.
There we see the shah, with his arrow, sitting in front of a decorative screen on a
hillside. The painter is at his feet; he is talking, and his hand rests on his painting
so we can’t see it. Apparently either Qadi Ahmad or his illustrator cared more
about the story of treachery and inspiration than the appearance of the painting;
and from what we are told about the shah’s response, he may have felt the same
way.^28
Yet the painting that we see doesn’t show the competition between the
artists, but is the painting described in the poem. It cannot show the
competition, because the identity of the competitors continually shifts.
The citation, marked with a [*] in the preceding poem, describing ink
soon to reach its target, suggests that the arrow the king holds is meta-
phorically also a pen targeting the paper. The arrow indicates interpreta-
tion that hits its mark. It is a pen that writes thought as deep as the sea: the
true artist is the one who paints the heart. Successive allusions to sexual
intimacy (with the felicitous companion), to painting, and to writing come
to signal the internalized divine. The king squints not because he evaluates
the arrow, as in the illustration, and not because he is blind, but because
closing the external eye enables him to see straight. Far from extraneous,
the painting within the painting, depicting a standoffbetween two animals
inkhata’istyle, references the Chinese associations of the Mani-like com-
panion, allegorizes a tense stand-off, and resembles thetiraz-styled paint-
ings described in the text. Thus the depictionflatters the king with insight,
but through the vehicle of the portrait imagined by the felicitous compa-
nion, who is both the artist who painted this painting, wielding theqalam
of the brush, and the writer who described it, wielding theqalamof the pen,
and the Divine who endows insight. The divine, the word, and the image
are not oppositional but indivisible; one slips into the other. In order to see
the favored companion’s art, the king in the illustration turns his back to
(^27) Minorksy, 1959 : 178. (^28) Elkins, 2013 : 108.
Qadi Ahmad and Painting as Calligraphy 169