Too often those in pow­er lump thou­sands of years of Mid­dle East­ern reli­gion and cul­ture into mono­lith­ic enti­ties to be feared or per­se­cut­ed. But at least one gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tion is doing exact­ly the oppo­site. For Nowruz, the Per­sian New Year, the Library of Con­gress has released a dig­i­tal col­lec­tion of its rare Per­sian-lan­guage man­u­scripts, an archive span­ning 700 years. This free resource opens win­dows on diverse reli­gious, nation­al, lin­guis­tic, and cul­tur­al tra­di­tions, most, but not all, Islam­ic, yet all dif­fer­ent from each oth­er in com­plex and strik­ing ways.

“We nowa­days are pro­grammed to think Per­sia equates with Iran, but when you look at this it is a mul­ti­re­gion­al col­lec­tion,” says a Library spe­cial­ist in its African and Mid­dle East­ern Divi­sion, Hirad Dinavari. “Many con­tributed to it. Some were Indi­an, some were Tur­kic, Cen­tral Asian.” The “deep, cos­mopoli­tan archive,” as Atlas Obscura’s Jonathan Carey writes, con­sists of a rel­a­tive­ly small num­ber of manuscripts—only 155. That may not seem par­tic­u­lar­ly sig­nif­i­cant giv­en the enor­mi­ty of some oth­er online col­lec­tions.

But its qual­i­ty and vari­ety mark it as espe­cial­ly valu­able, rep­re­sen­ta­tive of much larg­er bod­ies of work in the arts, sci­ences, reli­gion, and phi­los­o­phy, dat­ing back to the 13th cen­tu­ry and span­ning regions from India to Cen­tral Asia and the Cau­cus­es, “in addi­tion to the native Per­sian speak­ing lands of Iran, Afghanistan and Tajik­istan,” the LoC notes.

Promi­nent­ly rep­re­sent­ed are works like the epic poem of pre-Islam­ic Per­sia, the Shah­namah, “likened to the Ili­ad or the Odyssey,” writes Carey, as well as “writ­ten accounts of the life of Shah Jahan, the 17th-cen­tu­ry Mughal emper­or who over­saw con­struc­tion of the Taj Mahal.”

The Library points out the archive includes the “most beloved poems of the Per­sian poets Saa­di, Hafez, Rumi and Jami, along with the works of the poet Niza­mi Gan­javi.” Some read­ers might be sur­prised at the pic­to­r­i­al opu­lence of so many Islam­ic texts, with their col­or­ful, styl­ized bat­tle scenes and group­ings of human fig­ures.

Islam­ic art is typ­i­cal­ly thought of as icon­o­clas­tic, but as in Chris­t­ian Europe and North Amer­i­ca, cer­tain sects have fought oth­ers over this inter­pre­ta­tion (includ­ing over depic­tions of the Prophet Moham­mad). This is not to say that the icon­o­clasts deserve less atten­tion. Much medieval and ear­ly mod­ern Islam­ic art uses intri­cate pat­terns, designs, and cal­lig­ra­phy while scrupu­lous­ly avoid­ing like­ness­es of humans and ani­mals. It is deeply mov­ing in its own way, rig­or­ous­ly detailed and pas­sion­ate­ly exe­cut­ed, full of math­e­mat­i­cal and aes­thet­ic ideas about shape, pro­por­tion, col­or, and line that have inspired artists around the world for cen­turies.

The page from a lav­ish­ly illu­mi­nat­ed Qur’ān, above, cir­ca 1708, offers such an exam­ple, writ­ten in Ara­bic with an inter­lin­ear Per­sian trans­la­tion. There are reli­gious texts from oth­er faiths, like the Psalms in Hebrew with Per­sian trans­la­tion, there are sci­en­tif­ic texts and maps: the Rare Per­sian-Lan­guage Man­u­script Col­lec­tion cov­ers a lot of his­tor­i­cal ground, as has Per­sian lan­guage and cul­ture “from the 10th cen­tu­ry to the present,” the Library writes. Such a rich tra­di­tion deserves care­ful study and appre­ci­a­tion. Begin an edu­ca­tion in Per­sian man­u­script his­to­ry here.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2019.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er the Per­sian 11th Cen­tu­ry Canon of Med­i­cine, “The Most Famous Med­ical Text­book Ever Writ­ten”

15,000 Col­or­ful Images of Per­sian Man­u­scripts Now Online, Cour­tesy of the British Library

The Com­plex Geom­e­try of Islam­ic Art & Design: A Short Intro­duc­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

On paper, the Nazis should­n’t have liked Gus­tav Klimt. As gal­lerist and Youtu­ber James Payne says in his new Great Art Explained video above, their denun­ci­a­to­ry “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937 includ­ed the work of “Paul Klee, Otto Dix, Pablo Picas­so, Marc Cha­gall, and Piet Mon­dri­an, as well as Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokosch­ka” — but some­how not Klimt, “who, at one time or anoth­er, had been described as moral­ly ques­tion­able, obscene, or even porno­graph­ic, and was friends with Jew­ish patrons, intel­lec­tu­als, and artists.” And it isn’t as if the Nazis just ignored his work; in fact, they active­ly pressed a few of his paint­ings into the ser­vice of their ide­ol­o­gy.

The search for those paint­ings, and thus an answer to the ques­tion of how they could have been giv­en a pro-Nazi spin, takes Payne to Vien­na (this video being part of his Great Art Cities sub-series). It was there that the 22-year-old Klimt — along with his broth­er Ernst and their friend Franz Mach — received the career-mak­ing com­mis­sion, straight from the emper­or him­self, to paint a series of ten his­tor­i­cal murals on the ceil­ings and walls of the city’s sto­ried Burgth­e­ater. This made pos­si­ble Klimt and Mach’s next major mur­al project for the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vien­na, though the for­mer’s con­tri­bu­tions were reject­ed by the offi­cials, and lat­er delib­er­ate­ly destroyed by Ger­man forces retreat­ing at the war’s end.

Hav­ing died in 1918, Klimt nev­er learned of his work’s ulti­mate fate (much less its more recent recon­struc­tion with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence). Even by the time the Nazis rose to pow­er, he’d been dead long enough for them to appro­pri­ate his art, and even the much more dar­ing art he made after the Uni­ver­si­ty of Vien­na deba­cle. Take his Beethoven Frieze from 1902, a “34-meter-long homage to Beethoven’s Ninth Sym­pho­ny as inter­pret­ed by Richard Wag­n­er: Hitler’s favorite piece of music, often played at Nazi ral­lies, inter­pret­ed by his favorite com­pos­er.” That Klimt “cel­e­brates the tri­umph of ide­al­ism over mate­ri­al­ism” seems to have rep­re­sent­ed enough of a philo­soph­i­cal over­lap to be use­ful to the Third Reich.

“In 1943, in Vien­na, the Nazis even spon­sored the largest-ever ret­ro­spec­tive of Klimt’s art.” Indeed, Payne iden­ti­fies “a Teu­ton­ic qual­i­ty to Klimt’s work that would have appealed to the Nazi aes­thet­ic.” But he could also be por­trayed as “part of the Aus­tri­an folk tra­di­tion” with “Ger­man philo­soph­i­cal roots,” and like con­ven­tion­al Nazi artists, Klimt made much use of clas­si­cal icons and nude bod­ies. Yet there is lit­tle in his life or world­view of which the Nazis could pos­si­bly have approved, and even his work itself sug­gests that he knew full well the dan­gers of pop­u­lar appeal. “If you can­not please every­one with your actions and art, you should sat­is­fy a few,” says the quo­ta­tion from the poet and philoso­pher Friedrich Schiller incor­po­rat­ed into Klimt’s 1899 paint­ing Nuda Ver­i­tas. “To please many is dan­ger­ous.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Gus­tav Klimt’s Icon­ic Paint­ing The Kiss: An Intro­duc­tion to Aus­tri­an Painter’s Gold­en, Erot­ic Mas­ter­piece (1908)

The Nazis’ Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

Gus­tav Klimt’s Mas­ter­pieces Destroyed Dur­ing World War II Get Recre­at­ed with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Vienna’s Alberti­na Muse­um Puts 150,000 Dig­i­tized Art­works Into the Pub­lic Domain: Klimt, Munch, Dür­er, and More

136 Paint­ings by Gus­tav Klimt Now Online (Includ­ing 63 Paint­ings in an Immer­sive Aug­ment­ed Real­i­ty Gallery)

The Life & Art of Gus­tav Klimt: A Short Art His­to­ry Les­son on the Aus­tri­an Sym­bol­ist Painter and His Work

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.