A very rare early illustration to a mid-13th century obscene poem, Bukhara, Iran, late...

A very rare early illustration to a mid-13th century obscene poem, Bukhara, Iran, late 16th century, ink and opaque pigments heightened with gold, depicting lovers including a figure in a distinctive black hat, in various coupling positions in a brightly coloured and patterned tile interior, with 2 lines of Persian nasta'liq above and below within cloudbands on a gold ground, and diagonal line of the same above and below, outer border decorated in gold with animals on a floral ground, signature top left, mounted, glazed and framed, painting 26.5 x 17cm.

Provenance: Estate of costume designer Anthony Powell (1935-2021)

Ostensibly, this single folio was part of a manuscript of the collected works (Kulliyāt) of the renowned Persian poet and mystic, Saʿdī of Shiraz (d. 1292 CE). The painting is partially framed by five couplets that belong to a short narrative poem (masnavī) that is found in the little-studied and unpublished collection of Saʿdīs obscene works (khabīsāt), which are featured prominently in the earliest manuscripts of the Kulliyāt (see D. Ingenito, Beholding Beauty: Saʿdi of Shiraz and the Aesthetics of Desire in Medieval Persian Poetry). The poem, which comprises seventy couplets, recounts the story of a handsome young man who marries an uncomely and ill-mannered woman. Upon experiencing an erotic fiasco during their first night together, the young man begs his father-in-law to allow him to divorce his wife. The father rejects this request by telling the young man that he would have to spend time in jail in order to pay back his daughters dowry. After thinking at length about his miserable condition, the young husband resorts to the uncanny expedient of seducing and sexually subjugating his wifes entire family and entourage, without discriminating between women and men of any age. Being the only family member who has not been assaulted by the young man, the father consents to the divorce of the couple with no further hesitation.

The five couplets quoted in this folio pertain to the central part of the poem, which offers a detailed description of the orgiastic spree undertaken by the young man. As is often the case with Saʿdīs obscene works, in these lines, explicit descriptions of sexual acts are juxtaposed with delicate similes and metaphors that are drawn from the poets inimitable lyric style

The combination of high and low poetic registers in Saʿdīs ludic narration in verse is reflected in the stylistic elegance with which the painting portrays scenes of sexual disinhibition. In fact, in this folio (if one takes into account the contents of the entire poem), the visual and literary texts simultaneously stage the lewd and the alluring dimensions of eroticism: intimate body parts are covered and uncovered by fine garments, while mechanical forms of sexual penetration reveal seductive tensions between bodies enraptured by desire. The decorative aspect of pieces of clothing, rugs, curtains, along with the delicate rotation of different limbs, seems to mimic the rhetorical embellishments with which Saʿdīs lines describe multiple forms of vaginal and anal intercourse.

Whereas the poem, line by line, offers a list of the young mans sexual encounters with the members of his wifes family in chronological order, the painting portrays all of them simultaneously. The orgiastic aesthetics of the visual representation does not allow onlookers to recognize specific details found in the poem (apart from a candle held by a young man on the bottom right). The young husband, as a serial penetrator, occupies a different timeframe in each section of the painting. While his physical features appear to be always the same, different erotic settings are distinguished by different garments.

At the center of the painting, as a bizarre variation of the erotic scenes, the young husband appears to have a darker skin color. Moreover, instead of having sex with a beardless male or female youth, the darker boy seems to be penetrating a bearded man. A man with similar facial features and hair appears on the top right of the painting. One could assume that this adult male is the visual depiction of the young mans father-in-law who, in the versified plot, fears the sexual intentions of his daughters husband after having been made aware of the erotic tumult he has brought to his family.

Stylistic features of this painting suggest that it was produced in Shiraz between the 1560s and the 1570s CE (see, for instance, a Gulistān copied in Shiraz in 1575). Visual representations of Saʿdīs bawdy verses (and, in general, of obscene poetry) are extremely rare before the 17^th century. Nonetheless, a manuscript of Saʿdīs Kulliyāt copied in Shiraz in 1566 (British Library, Add. 24944) presents a painting that is strikingly similar to this one [reproduced by Boone, see attachment] and illustrates exactly the same erotic masnavī. Even though both Lâle Uluç and Joseph Allen Boone misread Saʿdīs poem as a text on lovemaking techniques and its visual representation found in Add. 24944 (f. 333) as a brothel scene, these documents attest to the existence of a Saʿdī-centric tradition of erotic iconography that developed in Shiraz during the second half of the 16^th century

With special thanks for this cataloguing to Domenico Ingenito, Associate Professor of Persian Literature, University of California, Los Angeles