The Ezzat Malek Soudavar Shahnama: Illustrating Firdawsi s Book of Kings in the Early Qajar Period

Eclipsed by the rise of oil painting on canvas, nineteenthcentury manuscript painting in Iran has so far attracted little scholarly attention. An unpublished volume of Firdawsis Shahnama (Book of Kings), formerly in the collection of EzzatMalek Soudavar, offers new perspectives on the genre during the reign of FathAli Shah Qajar (17971834), when artistic production received not only royal patronage but also strong support from the Qajar and urban elites. In this talk, assistant curator Simon Rettig will present his research on the fortyseven illustrations added sometime between 1810 and 1830 to the manuscript originally copied in the early seventeenth century. Simon Rettig is assistant curator of Islamic art at the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, the Smithsonians National Museum of Asian Art. He previously worked at the French Research Institute of Anatolian Studies in Istanbul and the Freie Üniversität in Berlin. He joined the Freer and Sackler in 2012. Since then, he has curated