Angel (Maiden)

In a garden where one young tree stands in white blossom and another bends beneath the weight of ripe pomegranates, two figures have met. A youth in a lilac caftan leans forward and, with both hands, tilts his vessel — pouring in a thin stream downward, into the golden vessel held by a winged maiden. It is not she who fills it — he gives her all that he carries. Herein lies the essence. The Sufi calls this self-emptying: to receive the highest, the heart must pour itself out to the very bottom, letting go of its own 'I'. The youth does not keep the wine for himself — and the wine here is that very wine of which Hafiz sang, the intoxication of love that inebriates without drunkenness — he pours it out toward the heavenly, and what is given is not lost but received from above. The maiden's wings blaze with gold, blue, and scarlet; the radiant crown above her face tells whence the light proceeds. She does not take by force — she has knelt and merely holds out the vessel, for the gift ascends only by the good will of the giver. The two trees behind them are like an arch of the path: the white blossom of a pure beginning and the ripened pomegranate at its end. The pomegranate, fruit of the paradise gardens of the Quran, conceals beneath its rind a multitude of seeds within a single skin — an image of the fullness that comes to replace emptiness: the youth pours himself out dry, while beside him ripens a fruit filled to the brim with seeds. This scene took the master ninety days of painting with a brush finer than a hair. About the work The work is executed in the spirit of Bukhara book miniature of the 16th–17th centuries — the art of Maverannahr, which absorbed the refinement of the Herat circle with its love of the flowering garden and the slender figure. The scene of wine-drinking and cup-bearing is one of the most enduring images of the Persian–Central Asian tradition, where the cup and the wine long ago ceased to be literal and became a language of mystical love. The winged giver-figure points to a broad body of depictions of heavenly messengers in Eastern painting. The fine rendering of foliage and flowers, the gilded rocks and stylized clouds, the richly ornamented field with figures of animals along its edges are characteristic marks of this circle. The background does not reproduce any particular locality but creates an image of an ideal garden. Details Base: Natural handmade Bukhara silk paper (90% silk, 10% cotton) Technique: Tempera, watercolour, natural plant and mineral pigments, gold leaf (23 carat) Unique piece