Unknown Painter
From A Life of Timur (Zafarnama) of 1529 in Tabriz
Can you play count the prey here? I count nineteen, not including the horses of course. From the elephant emerging from the rocks to the tiger grappling with a hunter, this painting is a sensory overload of royal slaughter.
Hunting was one of the chief pastimes of the Persian elite, and there are many stories of great hunting expeditions by rulers and princes. Timur the Great, the conqueror of the eastern Islamic world, and founder of the Timurid dynasty, is, as you would expect, depicted as a great hunter.
Together with his retinue, Timur is attacking what seems to be the craziest mass of animals all together in this blue and pastel landscape. They prowl out from the rocks run frantically, but there is no escape from the Shah and his men.
In reality, Timur was both a brutal conqueror, noted for razing cities to the ground and heaping the skulls of their inhabitants outside, and a cultured patron of literature and the arts, particularly architecture.
The unknown painter has a masterful touch with the animals in this painting. They leap or lurk with sinuous motions, as the hunters twist in their saddles to shoot them.
The cool tone of this painting is achieved with the blue ground and pastel mountain of rocks in which animals are hiding. Despite the killing in this scene, the colours make it restful rather than frentic in mood.