mirror of the heart. This mirror offers an unreal space resembling that
demonstrated by Parrhasius’theatrical curtains. His false curtain refuses
access to a potential space of deception. Like Mani’s dead dog, it remedies
the danger of illusion by including the viewer in its game.
Yet in the Islamic context, this unreal space is not one of deception, but
of transparent visual and cognitive reflection. As al-Ghazali says,“just as
every object has a form whose image is impressed on becomes manifest in
the mirror, so every knowable concept has a reality whose form is
impressed upon and becomes manifest on the mirror of the heart.”^35 It is
through this manifestation, the coming-into-presence that takes place in
the heart/mirror, that we as humans comprehend reality. The divine, as ibn
Arabi points out, requires the cosmos as its mirror. The material world is
not real. Rather, the reflection–not a deceptive representation, but a
manifestation– is where Reality resides. What is on the painted wall
becomes irrelevant because the story is about neither artists nor painting,
but viewing. As with music, the theoretical concern over mimetic reception
lies less in the object than in the polishing of the receptive organ, the heart,
to receive the information provided by the eyes or the ears. Inward prevails
over outward mimesis.
In contrast, European writers took up the story as an origin for art.
Italian humanists used the story of Zeuxis and Parrhasius to model their
understanding of the role of the artist as a“rivalry between technicians for
the production of a replica so perfect that art will take the palm from
nature.”^36 Hartmann Schedel (1440–1514) included the story in hisLiber
Chronicarum(Book of Chronicles), published in Nuremberg in 1493.
Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) developed it in his narration of art as a story
of triumph and obsolescence between competing painters.
This model of art as a progression of masters and masterpieces does not
reflect the process of Islamic artistic legacies. Rather than producing com-
mercial rivals, the workshop system of the manuscript arts limited emphasis
on individual artists. This frustrated some modern historians of Islamic arts
who solved the problem of the relative paucity of named masters by empha-
sizing renowned artists such as the Persian Bihzad, the Ottoman Levni, or
the Mughal Bichitr to define genres and eras. This master-based model does
not reflect the interchange between artists, and the extent to which painting
was often communal rather than competitive.^37 Such communal production
reverberates with a repeated reluctance to choose winners in the stories
about competition. Like Parhassius’stage or Mani’s dead dog, the mirrored
(^35) Treiger, 2012 : 32. (^36) Bryson, 1983 :1. (^37) Roxburgh, 2000.
The Competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasius 173