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PERSIAN MINIATURES 1
Burlington VERY slowly it is becoming possible to construct
a history of Persian painting. Until
quite lately all attempts were frustrated by
what is sure to frustrate the attempts of the
first historians of any " school " or " slope,"
or, for that matter, of any subject whatever
a false point of departure. So long as it
was supposed that Behzad was the first
mature master of Persian painting, Persian
art-historians were as inevitably out in their
conjectures as were the people who used to
believe that Raphael was what they would have
called " ikefons et "
origo of European painting.
We are now if acquainted, not familiar, with
Persian paintings of the thirteenth and early
fourteenth centuries, with the Mongol and
with a pre-Mongol school for it seems im-
prudent to give the name Mongol to works
that can be assigned to a date earlier than
1 To make the most of an article of this sort the reader
ought, obviously, to have illustrations by him. For these,
in the original even, I was obliged to refer to back numbers
of the Burlington Magazine, and now I must refer also to the
plates that accompanied this article when first it appeared.
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