Conversation with the Prince

At the edge of the royal garden, beneath a slender cypress, sits a young prince. In one hand is a bow, in the other a single arrow, but his hand does not draw the string. The weapon of earthly victories lies idle: before that which has opened within him, strength is powerless. Opposite him is a woman in a yellow veil, a messenger and keeper of a secret; her gesture carries tidings of her who reigns above. And there, on the height with its golden sky and blue domes, upon a dais beneath a striped canopy, surrounded by her retinue, sits the princess — a crowned beloved, unattainable as the ideal itself. Between them wind brooks and stretch hills: the valleys of the path, which cannot be crossed on horseback. The black steed that bore the seeker to the threshold now stands aside without its rider — the impulse brought him to the border, but beyond it one steps on foot and empty-handed. Above the prince rises the cypress — in the East a sign of the slender form of the beloved: he sits at the very foot of her image, and his every thought is of her alone. Three months went into this scene, painted with a single-hair brush; and the patience with which each blade of grass is drawn here the hero himself has yet to learn — for one comes to Beauty not by the arrow, but by humility and readiness to listen. About the work The miniature continues the tradition of the court book painting of Maverannahr of the 16th–17th centuries, where the romantic epic — tales of lovers separated by distance and fate — was read at once as a story of earthly passion and as a parable of the soul's path to the Beloved. The composition is built on two tiers: the unattainable height with its golden sky and domes above, and the seeker's world below, and they are divided by a winding line of water — a device by which the Bukhara masters conveyed the distance between the desired and the attained. The scene of the tidings brought by a female intermediary is an enduring motif of the Persian–Central Asian miniature, going back to the poetic compendia about lovers. The golden background and the finest rendering of the garden with a single-hair brush are characteristic of the school's best examples. The work is sustained in the recognizable Bukhara palette — lilac hillocks, flowering trees, the dense gold of the sky. 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