Drawn from the Shadows: A Shiraz Shahnameh of 1493

About the Talk: Among the Persian manuscripts today in the Aga Khan Museum is a copy of Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh illustrated in the so-called “commercial Turkman” style of late fifteenth-century Shiraz. A colophon on its final page, dated 898/1493, names a certain Qasim Khan as the manuscript’s dedicatee. The suite of elaborate royal titles and epithets that the colophon ascribes to him leaves little doubt about Qasim Khan’s status as a member of the ruling elite. Nonetheless, published studies of the manuscript over the past half-century have yet to identify this figure further. In this presentation, Qasim Khan’s identity will be established for the first time. Drawing on primary sources, contemporary chronicles, and later historiography, the lecture situates the 1493 Shahnameh within the framework of his life, career, and patronage activities, while revealing the manuscript to be an important document for the turbulent final decade and a half of Aq Qoyunlu rule-a pivotal moment obscured by gaps and inconsistencies in the historical record. Comparative analysis of its illustrations with stylistically related examples further invites a nuanced reconsideration of Shiraz production during this period of turmoil.

About the Speaker: Michael Chagnon is a specialist of painting and the arts of the book from the early modern Persianate sphere. He has served as Curator at the Aga Khan Museum since May 2019, where he has curated numerous acclaimed exhibitions, most recently Rumi: A Visual Journey through the Life and Legacy of a Sufi Poet (2023). He has previously held curatorial posts at the Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, and Japan Society and has served in curatorial capacities for exhibitions at New-York Historical Society and Asia Society Museum. In addition, he serves as Assistant Professor (status-only) in the Departments of Art History and Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at University of Toronto. Dr. Chagnon’s recent publications include the exhibition catalogue Rumi: A Visual Journey through the Life and Legacy of a Sufi Poet (2023), and the peer-reviewed essays “Riza ‘Abbasi and the Embedded Image” (2024), “Interpreting a Later Safavid Vase: Between Material, Object, and Image” (2024), and “Flirting with the Radical: Intertextuality, Intervisuality, and Gendered Subversions in Manuscripts of Sūz u Gudāz” in the Journal of Material Cultures in the Muslim World (2021). Dr. Chagnon received his PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University in 2015.