Aga Khan Lecture Series: “On the Edge: The Divan of Sultan Ahmad Jalayir”
Date and Time
Location
April 10, 2025, 6:00pm
“On the Edge: The Divan of Sultan Ahmad Jalayir”
Massumeh Farhad
The Ebrahimi Family Curator of Persian, Arab, and Turkish Art, Senior Associate Director for Research, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art
The Divan of the Jalayirid Sultan Ahmad (reigned 1382-1410) in the collection of the Freer Gallery of Art remains one of the most original and intriguing early Persian manuscripts. Commissioned by the ruler and patron as a personal copy, it contains one section of his seven-part poetic work. The volume’s fine binding, elegant calligraphy, and especially its extraordinary marginal ink drawings that draw on both Eastern and Western pictorial ideals, belie the tumultuousness of the period. Despite Timur’s repeated incursions into Jalayirid territory, internal political strife, and frequent outbreaks of the bubonic plague, Sultan Ahmad succeeded in attracting a talented group of artists to his peripatetic court and commissioned several manuscripts, such as the Divan, which changed the course of Persian arts of the book. This paper will examine the Divan as a whole and consider it in the light of the broader artistic, literary, and historical context of the late fourteenth century and early fifteenth century.