The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (37 page)

Alexander ordered the curtain hung once again between the paintings. Now the Westerner’s painting still glowed, while the other’s faded and disappeared. When the curtain was drawn up again the Chinese’s mirror-picture reappeared.

Wherever Islam spread, its rulers brought a love of pictorial art. They left a rich legacy in Spain, where the elegant marble lions in the courtyard of the Alhambra, near Granada, still proclaim the victory of man’s impulse to create.

Although statues of living persons were rare in medieval Islam, life-histories appeared early in Arabic-Muslim literature out of efforts to confirm the sources of Traditions of the Prophet. And history was mainly exegesis of the Prophet and of lives of the faithful. Figure painting remained a secular courtly art, a silent witness to the separation into two cultures. One was the culture of the folk with its primitive fear of images, and the other the luxurious culture of the caliphs who had the power, the wealth, and the imagination to defy ancient taboo. The earliest works of pictorial art in Islam were relics of the sybaritic Umayyad caliphs, who became bywords for their contempt of the strict commandments of the Prophet. Still the power of tradition and theologians remained strong enough to keep figure painting out of Muslim religious buildings.

The Mongols surging west were reckless in their destructive passions. In 1220, when Genghis Khan and his Mongols sacked Bukhara, cultural center of Islam, they shredded the manuscripts of the Koran to make litter for their horses stabled in the Great Mosque. And in 1258, when Hulagu, his grandson, captured Baghdad, which had been the treasure city of the Abbasid caliphs for five centuries, he murdered the last of the Abbasid caliphs, massacred eight hundred thousand of its inhabitants, and allowed his Mongols to plunder the city for a week.

And with the decline of the caliphate, the Mongols and Turks who conquered or were conquered by Islam diluted the traditions with their own tastes. By the fifteenth century, Muslim theologians had yielded to the facts of life, to their rulers’ passions for ornament and the beauties of representational art. Now some of the revered sayings of the Prophet were dismissed. The Mongol and Turkish rulers consummated their blasphemy by claiming distinction for themselves as painters. The great founder of Moghul India, Babur (1483–1530), of the line of Tamerlane who claimed descent from Genghis Khan, admired and patronized painters. By the sixteenth century
the shahs of Persia, too, were expecting to be praised by their chroniclers as “delicate painters with a fine brush.”

The supreme defiance of the traditional Muslim taboo came with a luxuriant art depicting the Prophet Himself. The Mongol invasions created a “Timurid” art (after Tamerlane (1336?–1405)), bringing together Persian and Chinese techniques in the art of manuscript illumination. A brilliant surviving work from fifteenth-century Herat, the art center of far-eastern Persia, was the
Miraj Nameh
, or
Night Journey of the Prophet
. The manuscript, translated into eastern Turkish and elegantly calligraphed, was acquired by Louis XIV’s ambassador to Constantinople and survives in mint condition in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In its sixty-one gilded illustrations we follow the miraculous ascension of the Prophet Mohammed on his graceful steed, Buraq, which had the head of a beautiful woman. Led by the angel Gabriel from the “Sacred Mosque” at Mecca to the “Far-off Mosque” in Jerusalem, he ascends from there through all six of the lower Heavens up to the Seventh Heaven, and finally to ecstatic contemplation of the Divine Essence at the Throne of God. En route the Prophet witnesses the torture of those who violated the commandments of their faith by such crimes as drinking wine, fornicating, speaking evil of Muslims (and making images like these?). Their tongues are cut out by red demons, only to grow back so they can be torn out again. The clear faces and figures of Mohammed and other biblical and Koranic characters are adorned by a flame-halo.

As great painters, including many from abroad, appeared in Islam, theologians had no difficulty making their work seem holy. Poets reminded the faithful that the visual arts, too, were inspired by God. The Persian mystic Jalal ad-Din Rumi (1207–1273), founder of the Whirling Dervish order, defended the painting of ugly as well as beautiful creatures to teach how evil too can come from God. An official Persian historian of the early sixteenth century, Khwandamir, revised the traditional Muslim view of painting in his praise of Master Behzad (c.1455–c.1536; active 1480–1536) whose brilliance as an illuminator and painter of miniatures created a newly exalted role for the painter. After Behzad proved that painting could be sublime, Muslims finally dared view God as “the Eternal Painter.” Even the artists who could not breathe life into their figures were now said to be emulating God, praising Him by their efforts. Snatched from the depths of hell, the painter was elevated to a heavenly role. So the official sixteenth-century Persian historian Khwandamir (died 1535) explained:

Now painters were dignified along with calligraphers as among “the most distinguished sons of Adam.” The Moghul emperor Akbar (1556–1605) even argued that only by trying to reproduce living beings, as the painter did, could man become fully aware of the disparity between insignificant man and the all-creating God. In Islam, art, like everything else, came to be covered by the pall of theology. There was no Muslim aesthetic nor, despite the grandeur of their artists’ works, any suggestion that art and beauty were their own reason for being.

The Muslim world never ceased to be haunted by Allah’s monopoly on creation. And the popular fear of images never died. When the militant sultan Mahmud II of Turkey (1785–1839; reigned 1808–30) had his portrait put up in the barracks in Constantinople, there was an uprising against this unclean act, which incited the carnage of four thousand bodies thrown into the sea.

Muslim rulers of Turkey, unlike their Christian contemporaries in the West who were flaunting their extravagant patronage of artistic splendor, still took pains to conceal their sponsorship of the arts. Muhammed II, one of the first of these Ottoman patrons of art, brought Gentile Bellini (1429?–1507) to Constantinople (1479–80), where he painted one of the best surviving portraits of the sultan. But this was not public knowledge, and somehow the sultans managed to preserve their pious reputations as enemies of pictorial art. Few sovereigns have left a more vivid pictorial record than Suleiman the Magnificent (1495?–1566; reigned 1520–66), alive today in a portrait by Titian and another by his own Nigari. The illuminated manuscripts that he commissioned for the historical record are unexcelled in their details of battles, sieges, and military splendor. Suleiman too managed to keep his reputation for piety.

The later Moghul emperors in India, including Akbar the Great (1556–1605), have acquired a unique vividness among rulers East or West by their bountiful patronage of portrait, landscape, and military painters, and their scrupulous insistence on colorful detail. Still, when collections of portraits of the Ottoman sultans were published in recent times, they were concealed from any but the sultans’ closest confidants. One bold official of Sultan Mustafa III (reigned 1757–73) dared commission some picturesque views of Constantinople, and engaged a painter (camouflaged as a physician) to visit him and paint his portrait. But when presented with the finished portrait,
he feared “it may even some day expose me to disparaging judgments in the minds of my family, even in those of my own children,” and so he gave back the painting to the artist under a pledge of secrecy.

When photography appeared in the nineteenth century, it offered a new challenge to the mullahs’ theological acrobatics. Muslims wishing to be photographed remembered the Hadiths against pictorial representation. They were glad to be told that since photographs were made by God Himself through the agency of His Sun they were not under the ban of the paintings by presumptuous human artists. Yet in much of the Muslim world, photographs remained under the Prophet’s ban. A Muslim photographer in Delphi, who had spent many years successfully photographing people in groups, in an onrush of conscience finally destroyed all his plates. But, ironically, when he attempted the blameless photography of inanimate buildings, he failed because he had no understanding of the laws of perspective.

Muslims who were tempted to create images that would outlast the span of life granted them by their Creator were inhibited again and again by their overweening dogma of God’s uniqueness. “Everything is perishing,” they quoted the Koran, “except the Face of God.” By refusing to make images of living beings, they would acquiesce in God’s uniqueness and man’s impotence. Like the Japanese at Ise, in their own way they refused to battle time and became its ally, leaving permanence to God alone.

B
Y
creating in words patterns of experience, man found some escape from his brief and changeful years. And among the most durable and charming of Greek creations were their myths of the gods. Quite appropriately, Dionysus, Greek god of drama, dance, and music, the most insecure of the Olympians, was twice-born. The jealous goddess Hera, Zeus’ consort, maliciously persuaded her rival lover Semele, a mortal woman, to demand that Zeus appear to her in his true celestial form. The dazzling sight killed her and prematurely brought out of her womb Zeus’ child whom she was carrying. Zeus sewed this fetus into his thigh, and in full time the infant Dionysus emerged again. Unique among the gods, he was born of mortal woman. A latecomer on Olympus, he never ceased to be a stranger there, but had a fertile life on earth. Worship of Dionysus spread across Greece into the Roman Empire. God of mystery and of contradictions, Dionysus was both the reassurer of the familiar return of spring and the opener of strange vistas.

The Great Dionysia in March and April sang elated hopes for renewal.

Dionysus was, as Plutarch described him, god of “the whole wet element”—of fertilizing moisture, of rain and dew, of wine, of lifeblood, of male semen, and of the juicy sap of plants. A god of the welcome return, he replenished jars with grain and oil, conceived and nourished the young of sheep and goat and cow. And Dionysus’ other name was Bacchus. The fruit of his vine was the lubricant and stimulant of dance and song, of unworldly and otherworldly delights. In this form of Bacchus he was worshiped in winter darkness. The Rural Dionysia in December and early January, repeated at the annual Lenaea (festival of Dionysus) in Athens in January and February, displayed a large phallus, with chants, dances, and comic revelry.

The Anthesteria in February and March, the season of flowers, Thucydides
tells us, was the most ancient celebration of Dionysus. On the first day, the jars of wine sealed since the autumn harvest were opened for libations at the god’s sanctuary. On the second day, the Day of the Jugs (Choes), each contestant was given a full jug of wine to drink, competing to see who could empty his first. A procession into the city from the sea accompanied Dionysus holding a vine alongside two satyrs playing flutes. After the parade of garland bearers and flute players and the sacrifice of a bull came a symbolic marriage, a “hierogamy” of the god himself to the queen of the city. On the last day special prayers were offered and special gruel offered for the returning dead. The rejoicing suddenly became ominous. For Dionysus was god of both Death and Life, and the dread dead were the source of life. “It is from the dead that food, growth and seeds come to us.” Lifeless winter and resurrecting spring were twin necessities of life. The vegetation-god had to die in order to be reborn. The last days of Dionysus’ festivals were evil, when the powers of the underworld returned.