Feature image: Attributed to Sultan Muhammad, Tahmuras Defeats the Divs, Folio 23v (detail) from the Shahnama of Shah Tahmasp, ca. 1525, Public Domain via The Met
The Persian Masterpiece That Was Cut Apart and Sold Page by Page
An illustrated manuscript is a single object made by many hands, with text and painting bound together in the order its makers intended. That same structure has long tempted collectors, since a codex of several hundred pages can be sold as several hundred separate works. The Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, made at the Safavid court in Tabriz in the 1520s and 1530s, is among the most lavish illustrated books ever produced, and Christie's once called it "one of the most sumptuous manuscripts ever created." It passed intact through the hands of a shah, an Ottoman sultan, and a French banker. In the twentieth century, an American collector took it apart, and in 1994 Iran gave up a Willem de Kooning painting to bring part of it home.
The Book of Kings at the Safavid Court
The Shahnameh, or Book of Kings, is Iran's national epic, completed by the poet Abu'l Qasim Firdausi in the early eleventh century. It recounts the reigns of Iran's kings from Kayumars, the mythical first ruler, to the Arab conquest of the seventh century. Most scholars date the start of work on the Tahmasp copy to the 1520s, when Shah Ismail I, founder of the Safavid dynasty, had recently taken control of Tabriz. Ismail died in 1524, and his son Tahmasp inherited the throne as a child. The manuscript was likely nearly complete by the mid-1530s. In its finished form, it held 759 folios, each about 48 by 32 centimeters, with text in nasta'liq script and 258 paintings. Several generations of artists in the royal workshop contributed, including Sultan Muhammad, Mir Musavvir, Aqa Mirak, Mir Sayyid Ali, Mirza Ali, and Dust Muhammad, and probably Abd al-Samad, though some attributions remain contested.
The most celebrated painting in the book opens its narrative. In a preface written in the 1540s, Dust Muhammad praised Sultan Muhammad above his contemporaries and singled out the scene of the first king's court, with its figures dressed in leopard skins. Sultan Muhammad's The Court of Kayumars (ca. 1524-25) places the king at the summit of a mountain above a gathering of courtiers, with his son Siyamak and his grandson Hushang nearby. The Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, which now holds the folio, notes that the scene follows the moment when Kayumars learns from the angel Surush that Siyamak will die in battle, and that the king gestures toward his unaware son in grief.
Sultan Muhammad directed much of the early work on the manuscript, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art attributes several of the opening folios to him. Sultan Muhammad's The Feast of Sada (ca. 1525) illustrates the episode in which King Hushang discovers fire and founds the festival of Sada to celebrate it. The Met catalogs the folios as opaque watercolor, ink, silver, and gold on paper.
From Tabriz to the Topkapı Palace
In 156,8 Tahmasp sent the manuscript to Istanbul as a gift for the Ottoman sultan Selim II. Ottoman sources record that it arrived with the Iranian embassy in February of that year, accompanied by thirty-four camels carrying other gifts. The book entered the Topkapı Palace library, where it remained for more than three centuries. During those centuries, the paintings acquired inserts written in Ottoman Turkish. According to Archnet, citing the art historian Ünver Rüstem's 2012 study in Muqarnas, those inserts were later separated from the manuscript, and many are now lost.
The pages that traveled to Istanbul included some of the darkest episodes in the epic. Sultan Muhammad's Zahhak Is Told His Fate (ca. 1524) belongs to the cycle of the tyrant Zahhak, the usurping king whose thousand-year reign the Shahnameh recounts as a time of terror, and the Met attributes the painting to Sultan Muhammad.
The Rothschilds and Arthur Houghton
The manuscript left Istanbul in the early twentieth century, around the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and entered the collection of Baron Edmond James de Rothschild. In 195,9 the American bibliophile Arthur A. Houghton Jr., heir to the Corning glass fortune, bought it from the Rothschild family after consulting leading art historians. Accounts of the price differ. The Art Newspaper reported in 1994 that Houghton paid about $400,000, and in a 2024 article the same paper gave the figure as $350,000.
Houghton commissioned a full study of the book from the scholar Stuart Cary Welch and the Princeton professor Martin Dickson. Their collaboration lasted sixteen years and, according to Archnet, was "beset by problems large and small, ranging from budget cuts and printing problems to the turmoil of the Iranian Revolution." Harvard University Press published the result in 1981 as a two-volume folio edition limited to 750 copies, with 21 paintings reproduced in color and the rest in black and white. Welch considered it his magnum opus. Qadimi's Faridun Embraces Manuchihr (ca. 1525), produced under Sultan Muhammad's direction, is among the folios the monograph recorded in their original sequence.
Cutting the Manuscript Apart
By the time the monograph appeared, the manuscript had been disbound. Houghton gave 78 of its paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a gift the museum's credit lines date to 1970, while other accounts give 1972. He sold another 62 at auction and to private buyers, and kept 118 paintings, along with the binding and text pages. Archnet's summary of the dispersal is blunt, observing that the paintings, "now dispersed across museums and private collections worldwide," "have never been seen together again."
The Met's share of the book reaches well into the epic. Qadimi and 'Abd al-Vahhab's Mihrab Vents His Anger Upon Sindukht (ca. 1525-30) comes from the story of Zal and Rudaba, in which King Mihrab of Kabul turns on his queen when he learns of their daughter's romance.
The Exchange at Vienna Airport
Houghton died in 1990, and the remains of the manuscript passed to his heirs. Meanwhile, in Tehran, the Museum of Contemporary Art held Willem de Kooning's Woman III, a nude from the early 1950s that had entered Iran's collection before the 1979 revolution and was considered unacceptable under the Islamic Republic. The London dealer Oliver Hoare negotiated a trade. On 28 July 1994, on the tarmac at Vienna Airport, Hoare delivered crates containing 118 paintings, 501 folios of text, and the original binding to Iranian officials, and Woman III went the other way. The Iranian embassy in London confirmed the exchange, which Vice-President Hassan Habibi had approved. The Art Newspaper cited a $20 million figure for the de Kooning at the time, and Sheila Canby of the British Museum called it "a very astute move by Iran."
Hoare later described the deal as a "miracle," and said that "each miniature of that manuscript has a status in the cultural history of the world." His memoir of the negotiation, The Exchange (2024), was published after his death. Woman III remains the only work ever to leave the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art's collection, and in 2006 it sold for $137.5 million. Bashdan Qara's Afrasiyab on the Iranian Throne (ca. 1525-30), which illustrates the Turanian king Afrasiyab seizing the Iranian throne and treasury, belongs to the Met's portion of the book.
Where the Pages Are Now
The manuscript now exists in several places at once. Iran holds the 118 paintings, the binding, and the text, which was returned in 1994. The Met keeps its 78 paintings, the Khalili Collection of Islamic Art holds ten folios, and the Aga Khan Museum showed The Court of Kayumars at its first exhibition in 2014 and again in 2019, in a light-sensor-fitted case to limit exposure. Folios still reach the market. On 6 April 2011, a page from Stuart Cary Welch's own collection sold for £7.4 million (about $12 million), then a record for Islamic art.
The Met's holdings also include some of the epic's most tender scenes. Qadimi's Rudaba Makes a Ladder of Her Tresses (ca. 1525) shows Princess Rudaba letting down her hair from a tower so Zal can climb to her, a love story the Shahnameh ties to the birth of the hero Rustam. Roxane Zand, a former deputy chair of Sotheby's for the Middle East, has said that "it is not particular to Iran, the question of how you compare the value of cultural heritage," and the Tahmasp folios that still come up for sale keep the question open.
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