The Dream of Scheherazade

Across a grey, as if faded, earth plods a wondrous camel, and its body is woven of living creatures: of people with tambourines and pipes, of hares, foxes, cockerels, fishes and beasts of prey, plaited into one restless shell. This is not a single creature but a multitude of passions, desires and clamouring souls, fused into an earthly 'I' — that very lowest nature which drags a man through the desert of life. A grotesque div leads it by the rein: while the spirit sleeps, a dark power rules the body and the passions, and the beast goes obediently wherever the demon draws it. But above this chaos, in a patterned palanquin under a painted domed roof, sits a winged angel — a lovely peri, a pure soul, aloof from the bustle below. In her hands is a chang, and she plays without looking at the div: there, where all is dim and grey, heavenly music sounds. The language of colour itself is also felt — the paint is silent throughout the earthly tier and flares up only here, in the sacred centre, for colour lives where the soul lives. To her right two dragon heads spew flame, but this flame is put on a leash: unseen hands hold the fire on a tether, not letting it touch the one who plays. Fury and destruction are not slain — they are tamed, and it is not force that holds them but the nearness of the singing soul. Even above, in the golden clouds, large birds have grappled with serpentine creatures — the same chaos, risen into the heavenly register. Thus the dream of Scheherazade is revealed: the wild and the fiery are subdued not by the sword but by art — by that music and that word with which, night after night, she calmed cruelty. On this scene the master spent seven months of work with a brush of a single hair. About the work The sheet develops the motif of the 'composite beast' — one of the most enigmatic inventions of the Persian and Central Asian miniature, which came into wide use from the end of the 16th century, where the animal's body is assembled from a multitude of intertwined figures of people, beasts and spirits. Such images were long read mystically — as a meditation on the nature of the soul and matter, on the lower 'I' and the mastery over it. The composition in which a composite beast is led by a demon while a winged peri sits above belongs to the enduring iconographic type of this tradition. The rendering of the earthly plane in a restrained silvery-grey manner, enlivened with colour and gold only at the sacred centre, answers the Bukhara taste for the finest of drawing and for cloud bands in the Far Eastern spirit. The subject joins the imagery of the 'Thousand and One Nights' with a Sufi reading of the soul's path. 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