Ilkhanid

also: Il-Khanid · Ilkhanid period

style c. 1256-1335 Iran Iraq

Ilkhanid art is the art of the Mongol dynasty that ruled Iran and Iraq from 1256 to 1335, with its capital at Tabriz. The conquest folded Persia into the Mongol cultural sphere, and with it came a flood of Chinese and Central Asian motifs - curling cloud bands, gnarled trees, wave-like rocks, dragons and phoenixes - woven into Persian subjects. Court workshops, above all the scriptorium that the vizier Rashid al-Din ran at the Rab'-e Rashidi suburb of Tabriz, produced illustrated histories and epics on an ambitious scale. The period's masterpieces, the Jami' al-Tawarikh and the Great Mongol Shahnameh, abandoned small, flat illustration for large, emotionally charged narrative scenes. Ilkhanid art reshaped Persian painting and set the stage for the classical Persian miniature.

Example work related to "Ilkhanid".
Example work related to "Ilkhanid".Public domain (credit: Unknown) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Chinese-derived motifs - curling cloud bands, gnarled trees, wave-like rocks - set inside Persian scenes
  • Large, dominant figures in crowded narrative compositions, unusual for Persian painting
  • Raw emotional display: mourning figures borrowed from Christian Lamentation imagery
  • Lapis blue and gold leaf; kings often given halos
  • Eclectic workshop practice: ink and wash beside opaque watercolour, mixed costumes and headdresses
  • Text and image integrated across the manuscript page, miniatures set into six columns of script

Key figures

  • Rashid al-Din Hamadani (1247-1318) — Vizier and historian whose Rab'-e Rashidi scriptorium at Tabriz produced the illustrated Jami' al-Tawarikh
  • Ghazan (1271-1304) — Ilkhan whose patronage and Islamic conversion reshaped Persianate court culture
  • Ahmad Musa (fl. c. 1330) — Painter credited by later Persian historians with founding the new pictorial style

Example works

Sources

← Back to the catalog