The Chinese Impact on Certain Fifteenth Century Persian Miniature Paintings from the Albums (Hazine Library Nos. 2153, 2154, 2160) in the Topkapi Sarayi Museum, Istanbul.

The artistic contact between China and the Islamic world was initiated as early as the eighth century; from that period waves of Chinese influence reached the Islamic world continually, sometimes in an obvious manner and sometimes in a more subtle one depending on the political, economic, and social circumstances of the two areas. The problems posed for this study relate to the Chinese impact on a group of the album paintings in the Topkapi Sarayi Museum which were presumably executed during the fifteenth century in the Persian world, concluding in its broader sense Afghanistan and Turkestan (Soviet Central Asia). The main purpose of the thesis is to demonstrate how Chinese pictorial art inspired local artists of the Persian world or, in other words, to demonstrate the process of adaptation, assimilation and transformation of Chinese style into an artistic idiom, or vocabulary, that reflects the local Persian painters' own interests, tastes, aesthetics, and concepts. The group of paintings selected from the Istanbul albums for discussion is comprised of figural compositions, basically with religious themes like "The Two Kuan-yin" and "Four Sleepers," and other paintings with literary-historical themes, for instance, two procession scenes which are hypothetically associated with the abductions and expedient marriages of two Chinese ladies, Wen-chi and Wang Chao-chun. The approach to the problems is primarily through descriptive, stylistic and iconographic analyses, leading to the identification of each painting's theme by comparison with dated and datable Chinese and Persian pictorial works, both in the Topkapi Sarayi as well as in other collections. Pastiche, the intermingling of artistic trends of diverse derivations in their themes, styles, iconography, and technique (format and painting material), is the most pronounced common feature in the Istanbul Albums. The major sources for the Album leaves in question are the Yuan stylistic and iconographic conventions and T'ang artistic conventions reworked into painting during the Yuan dynasty. The Istanbul painters accepted minor and subordinate elements from Chinese originals, whereas Chinese ideas and forms with religious and literary-historical associations, often the key factors for identifying the Chinese originals, were rejected. Occasionally, even major themes were perpetuated but without their original implications. Finally, the artists of the Istanbul Album paintings in question, on the whole, took large sections from Chinese originals. Chinese influence, thus, seems to be ampler in the Istanbul Albums than in earlier Persian works. Nevertheless, their short-lived hybrid-style, blending the T'ang and Yuan trends with the local tradition, found no followers to develop it further in the succeeding era.PhDFine artsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/158356/1/8116345.pd