Dramatically popularizing theological sources, Jami produces precisely the
type of good‘falsehood’or‘fiction’about the gods that Proclus (in the
tradition of Plato) praises. Poetry serves as the primary interpretive realm.
Bihzad’s painting resists similar identification. By choosing the scene
immediately after the seduction and representing the transcendent escape
from the palace of materiality, it transforms thefigures imbued with life in
Jami’s poem back into the non-mimeticfigures of prophetic discourse, as
in Sa’di’s emotionally disengaged poem that the painting illustrates. The
inset lines of Jami’s poem within the painting suggest an intellectual
assimilation of Jami’s mimetic act rather than the creation of independent
visual interpretation. Whereas Jami and European paintings interpret the
story through emotional identification with the protagonists, Bihzad’s
painting does not. Poetry provides a closer analogy for the mimetic effect
of European painting.
Instead, Bihzad’s painting represents the transcendent subject following
the Sufiideal of self-annihilation in the divine. Derin Terzioğlu sum-
marizes this attitude by quoting the visionary Sufitradition of the mystic
Junayd (d. 910), who says:“Sufism means that God makes you die to
yourself and makes you alive in Him.”Similarly, al-Hallaj says:
It is I that torments me
In grace to me, take this‘I’from between us!^103
Intertwining text, manuscript illumination, tile revetment, interior and
exterior architecture, and dramatic human action, the painting disorients
by refusing to position the viewer in relation to the characters. Rather than
depicting sexual and idolatrous temptation, it depicts escape from the
space of temptation. If we read Jami’s poem as a meditation on the function
of the image through the threat of the idol, then Bihzad’s visual interpreta-
tion affirms that the idol is not the only threat to monotheism. Rather, it
presents a microcosm of a larger threat, contained in the palace but
constituted by desire. The idol is neither thefigure of the god who must
be hidden, nor sexuality, nor the wealth of the palace, but a network of
desires potentially constitutingshirk.
Bihzad’s painting escapes from this worldly trap of material idols. In the
poem, Yusuf keeps trying to avert his gaze as representation after repre-
sentation depicts his lust, producing a spatial vertigo which he is unable to
escape except in his ultimate recourse to God. In contrast, the painting
offers no idols. Instead,flat layers of pattern, angled in patches that direct
(^103) Terzioğlu, 2002 : 139.
Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife in Post-Reformation Europe 265