My Name is Red

IT IS I, MASTER OSMAN

The Commader of the Imperial Guard and the Head Treasurer reiterated Our Sultan’s decrees before leaving the two of us alone. Of course, Black was exhausted by fear, crying and the ruse of torture. He fell quiet like a boy. I knew I would come to like him, and I didn’t disturb his peace.

I had three days to examine the pages that the Commander’s men collected from the homes of my calligraphers and master miniaturists, and to determine who had worked on them. You all know how disgusted I was when I first laid eyes on the paintings prepared for Enishte Effendi’s book, and how Black had given them to the Head Treasurer Hazım Agha to clear his name. Granted, there must be something to those pages for them to arouse such violent disgust and hatred in a miniaturist like myself who’s devoted his life to artistry; merely bad art wouldn’t provoke such a reaction. So, with newfound curiosity, I began to reexamine the nine pages that the deceased fool had commissioned from the miniaturists who came to him under cover of night.

I saw a tree in the middle of a blank page, situated within poor Elegant’s border design and gilding work, which gracefully framed every page. I tried to conjure the scene and story to which the tree belonged. If I had told my illustrators to draw a tree, dear Butterfly, wise Stork and wily Olive would have begun by conceiving of this tree as part of a story so they might draw the image with confidence. If I were then to scrutinize that tree, I’d be able to determine which tale the illustrator had in mind based on its branches and leaves. This, however, was a miserable, solitary tree; behind it, there was a quite high horizon line that hearkened back to the style of the oldest masters of Shiraz and accentuated the feeling of isolation. There was nothing at all, however, filling the area created by raising the horizon. The desire to depict a tree simply as such, as the Venetian masters did, was here combined with the Persian way of seeing the world from above, and the result was a miserable painting that was neither Venetian nor Persian. This was how a tree at the edge of the world would look. Attempting to combine two separate styles, my miniaturists and the barren mind of that deceased clown had created a work devoid of any skill whatsoever. But it wasn’t that the illustration was informed by two different worldviews so much as the lack of skill that incurred my wrath.

I felt the same way as I looked at the other pictures, at the perfect dream horse and the woman with the bowed head. The choice of subject matter also iritated me, whether it was the two wandering dervishes or Satan. It was obvious that my illustrators had coyly inserted these inferior pictures into Our Sultan’s illuminated manuscript. I felt renewed awe at exalted Allah’s judgment in taking Enishte’s life before the book had been finished. Needless to say, I had no desire whatsoever to complete this manuscript.

Who wouldn’t be annoyed by this dog, drawn from above but staring at me from just beneath my nose as if it were my brother? On the one hand, I was astounded by the plainness of the dog’s positioning, the beauty of its threatening sidelong glance, head lowered to the ground, and the violent whiteness of its teeth, in short, by the talent of the miniaturists who’d depicted it (I was on the verge of determining precisely who’d worked on the picture); on the other hand, I couldn’t forgive the way this talent had been harnessed by the absurd logic of an inscrutable will. Neither the desire to imitate the Europeans nor the excuse that the book Our Sultan had commissioned as a present for the Doge ought to make use of techniques familiar to the Venetians was adequate to explain the fawning pretension in these pictures.

I was terrified by the passion of red in one bustling picture, wherein I at once recognized the touch of each of my master miniaturists in each corner. An artist’s hand that I couldn’t identify had applied a peculiar red to the painting under the guidance of an arcane logic, and the entire world revealed by the illustration was slowly suffused by this color. I spent some time hunched over this crowded picture pointing out to Black which of my miniaturists had drawn the plane tree (Stork), the ships and houses (Olive), and the kite and flowers (Butterfly).

“Of course, a great master miniaturist like yourself, who’s been head of a book-arts division for years, could distinguish the craft of each of his illustrators, the disposition of their lines and the temperament of their brush strokes,” Black said. “But when an eccentric book lover like my Enishte forces these same illustrators to paint with new and untried techniques, how can you determine the artists responsible for each design with such certainty?”

I decided to answer with a parable: “Once upon a time there was a shah who ruled over Isfahan; he was a lover of book arts, and lived all alone in his castle. He was a strong and mighty, intelligent, but merciless shah, and he had love only for two things: the illustrated manuscripts he commissioned and his daughter. So devoted was this shah to his daughter that his enemies could hardly be faulted for claiming he was in love with her-for he was proud and jealous enough to declare war on neighboring princes and shahs in the event that one sent ambassadors to ask for her hand. Naturally, there was no husband worthy of his daughter, and he confined her to a room, accessible only through forty locked doors. In keeping with a commonly held belief in Isfahan, he thought that his daughter’s beauty would fade if other men laid eyes on her. One day, after an edition of Hüsrev and Shirin that he’d commissioned was inscribed and illustrated in the Herat style, a rumor began to circulate in Isfahan: The pale-faced beauty who appeared in one bustling picture was none other than the jealous shah’s daughter! Even before hearing the rumors, the shah, suspicious of this mysterious illustration, opened the pages of the book with trembling hands and in a flood of tears saw that his daughter’s beauty had indeed been captured on the page. As the story goes, it wasn’t actually the shah’s daughter, protected by forty locked doors, who emerged to be portrayed one night, but her beauty which escaped from her room like a ghost stifled by boredom, reflecting off a series of mirrors and passing beneath doors and through keyholes like a ray of light or wisp of smoke to reach the eyes of an illustrator working through the night. The masterful young miniaturist, unable to restrain himself, depicted the beauty, which he couldn’t bear to behold, in the illustration he was in the midst of completing. It was the scene that showed Shirin gazing upon a picture of Hüsrev and falling in love with him during the course of a countryside outing.”

“My beloved master, my good sir, this is quite a coincidence,” said Black. “I, too, am quite fond of that scene from Hüsrev and Shirin.”

“These aren’t fables, but events that actually happened,” I said. “Listen, the miniaturist didn’t depict the shah’s beautiful daughter as Shirin, but as a courtesan playing the lute or setting the table, because that was the figure he was in the midst of illustrating at the time. As a result, Shirin’s beauty paled beside the extraordinary beauty of the courtesan standing off to the side, thus disrupting the painting’s balance. After the shah saw his daughter in the painting, he wanted to locate the gifted miniaturist who’d depicted her. But the crafty miniaturist, fearing the shah’s wrath, had rendered both the courtesan and Shirin, not in his own style, but in a new way so as to conceal his identity. The skillful brush strokes of quite a few other miniaturists had gone into the work as well.”

“How had the shah discovered the identity of the miniaturist who portrayed his daughter?”

“From the ears!”

“Whose ears? The ears of the daughter or her picture?”

“Actually, neither. Following his intuition, he first laid out all the books, pages and illustrations that his own miniaturists had made and inspected all the ears therein. He saw what he’d known for years in a new light: Regardless of the level of talent, each of the miniaturists made ears in his own style. It didn’t matter if the face they depicted was the face of a sultan, a child, a warrior, or even, God forbid, the partially veiled face of Our Exalted Prophet, or even, God forbid again, the face of the Devil. Each miniaturist, in each case, always drew the ears the same way, as if this were a secret signature.”

“Why?”

“When the masters illustrated a face, they focused on approaching its exalted beauty, on the dictates of the old models of form, on the expression, or on whether it should resemble somebody real. But when it came time to make the ears, they neither stole from others, imitated a model nor studied a real ear. For the ears, they didn’t think, didn’t aspire to anything, didn’t even stop to consider what they were doing. They simply guided their brushes from memory.”

“But didn’t the great masters also create their masterpieces from memory without ever even looking at real horses, trees or people?” said Black.

“True,” I said, “but those are memories acquired after years of thought, contemplation and reflection. Having seen plenty of horses, illustrated and actual, over their lifetimes, they know that the last flesh-and-blood horse they see before them will only mar the perfect horse they hold in their thoughts. The horse that a master miniaturist has drawn tens of thousands of times eventually comes close to God’s vision of a horse, and the artist knows this through experience and deep in his soul. The horse that his hand draws quickly from memory is rendered with talent, great effort, and insight, and it is a horse that approaches Allah’s horse. However, the ear that is drawn before the hand has accumulated any knowledge, before the artist has weighed and considered what it is doing, or before paying attention to the ears of the shah’s daughter, will always be a flaw. Precisely because it is a flaw, or imperfection, it will vary from miniaturist to miniaturist. That is, it amounts to a signature.”

There was a commotion. The Commander’s men were bringing into the old workshop the pages they’d collected from the homes of the miniaturists and the calligraphers.

“Besides, ears are actually a human flaw,” I said, hoping Black would smile. “They’re at once distinct and common to everyone: a perfect manifestation of ugliness.”

“What happened to the miniaturist who’d been caught by the authorities through his style of painting ears?”

I refrained from saying, “He was blinded,” to keep Black from becoming even more downcast. Instead, I responded, “He married the shah’s daughter, and this method, which has been used to identify miniaturists ever since, is known by many khans, shahs and sultans who fund book-arts workshops as the ”courtesan method.“ Furthermore, it is kept secret so that if one of their miniaturists makes a forbidden figure or a small design that conceals some mischief and later denies having done so, they can quickly determine who was responsible-genuine artists have an instinctive desire to draw what’s forbidden! Sometimes their hands make mischief on their own. Uncovering these transgressions involves finding trivial, quickly drawn and repetitive details removed from the heart of the painting, such as ears, hands, grass, leaves, or even horses’ manes, legs or hooves. But beware, the method doesn’t work if the illustrator himself is mindful that this detail has become his own secret signature. Mustaches won’t work, for instance, because many artists are aware how freely they’re drawn as a sort of signature anyway. But eyebrows are a possibility: No one pays much attention to them. Come now, let’s see which young masters have brought their brushes and reed pens to bear upon late Enishte’s illustrations.”

Thus we brought together the pages of two illustrated manuscripts, one that was being completed secretly and the other openly, two books with different stories and subjects, illustrated in two distinct styles; that is, deceased Enishte’s book and the Book of Festivities recounting our prince’s circumcision ceremony, whose creation was under my control. Black and I looked intently wherever I moved my magnifying lens:

1. In the pages of the Book of Festivities, we first studied the open mouth of the fox whose pelt a master of the furrier’s guild, in a red caftan and purple sash, held on his lap as the guild passed before Our Sultan, watching the parade from a loge made specifically for the event. Unmistakably, Olive had made both the fox’s teeth, which were individually distinguishable, and the teeth in Enishte’s illustration of Satan, an ominous creature, half-demon and half-giant, that appeared to have come from Samarkand.

2. On a particularly joyous day of the festivities, below Our Sultan’s loge overlooking the Hippodrome, a division of impoverished frontier ghazis appeared in tattered clothes. One of their lot made a plea: “My Exalted Sultan, we, your heroic soldiers, fell captive as we fought the infidel in the name of our religion and were only able to gain our freedom by leaving a number of our brethren behind as hostages; that is, we were set free in order to amass ransom. However, when we arrived back in Istanbul, we found everything so expensive that we’ve been unable to collect the money to save our brethren who languish as prisoners of the kaffirs. We’re at the mercy of your aid. Please grant us gold or slaves that we might take back to exchange for their freedom.” Stork clearly made the nails of the lazy dog off to the side-glaring with one open eye at Our Sultan, at our poor, destitute ghazis and at the Persian and Tatar ambassadors in the Hippodrome-as well as the nails of the dog occupying a corner of the scene depicting the adventures of the Gold Coin in Enishte’s book.

3. Among the jugglers spinning eggs on pieces of wood and turning somersaults before Our Sultan was a bald man with bare calves wearing a purple vest, who played a tambourine as he sat off to one side on a red carpet; this man held the instrument exactly the same way the woman held a large brass serving tray in the illustration of Red in Enishte’s book: doubtless the work of Olive.

4. As the cooks’ guild pushed past Our Sultan, they were cooking stuffed cabbage with meat and onions in a cauldron resting on a stove in their cart. The master cooks accompanying the cart stood on pink earth resting their stew pots on blue stones; these stones were rendered by the same artist who made the red ones on dark-blue earth above which floated the half-ghostly creature in the illustration that Enishte called Death: the unmistakable work of Butterfly.

5. Mounted Tatar messengers brought word that the Persian Shah’s armies had begun to mobilize for another campaign against the Ottomans, who thereupon razed to the ground the exquisite observation kiosk of the Persian ambassador who’d repeatedly affirmed to Our Sultan, Refuge of the World, in a cascade of pleasantries, that the Shah was His friend and harbored nothing but brotherly affection for Him. During this episode of wrath and destruction, water bearers ran out to settle the dust raised in the Hippodrome, and a group of men appeared shouldering leather sacks full of linseed oil to pour over a mob ready to attack the ambassador, in hopes of pacifying it. The raised feet of the water bearers and of the men carrying sacks of linseed oil were made by the same artist who painted the raised feet of charging soldiers in the depiction of Red: also the work of Butterfly.

I wasn’t the one who made this last discovery as I directed our search for clues, moving the magnifying lens right and left, to that picture then this one; rather it was Black, who opened his eyes wide and scarcely blinked gripped by the fear of torture and the hope of returning to his wife who awaited him at home. Using the “courtesan method,” it took an entire afternoon to sort out which of our miniaturists worked on each of the nine pictures left by the late Enishte, and later, to interpret that information.

Black’s late Enishte didn’t limit any single page to the artistic talent of just one miniaturist; all three of my master miniaturists worked on most of the illustrations. This meant that the pictures were moved from house to house with great frequency. In addition to the work I recognized, I noticed the amateurish strokes of a fifth artist, but as I grew angry at the dearth of talent shown by this disgraceful murderer, Black determined from the cautious brush strokes that it was indeed the work of his Enishte-thereby saving us from following a false lead. If we discounted poor Elegant Effendi, who’d done almost the same gilding for Enishte’s book and our Book of Festivities (yes, this of course broke my heart) and who, I gathered, had occasionally lowered his brush to execute a few walls, leaves and clouds, it was evident that only my three most brilliant master miniaturists had contributed to these illustrations. They were the darlings I’d lovingly trained since their apprenticeships, my three beloved talents: Olive, Butterfly and Stork.

Discussing their talents, mastery and temperaments to the end of finding the clue we were looking for inevitably led to a discussion of my own life as well:

The Attributes of Olive

His given name was Velijan. If he had a nickname besides the one I’d given him, I don’t know it, because I never saw him sign any of his work. When he was an apprentice, he’d come get me from my home on Tuesday mornings. He was very proud, and so if he ever lowered himself to sign his work, he’d want this signature to be plain and recognizable; he wouldn’t try to conceal it anywhere. Allah had quite generously endowed him with excess ability. He could readily and easily do anything from gilding to ruling and his work was superb. He was the workshop’s most brilliant creator of trees, animals and the human face. Velijan’s father, who brought him to Istanbul when he was, I believe, ten years old, was trained by Siyavush, the famous illustrator specializing in faces in the Persian Shah’s Tabriz workshop. He hails from a long line of masters whose genealogy goes back to the Mongols, and just like the elderly masters who bore a Mongol-Chinese influence and settled in Samarkand, Bukhara and Herat 150 years ago, he rendered moon-faced young lovers as if they were Chinese. Neither during his apprenticeship nor during his time as a master was I able to lead this stubborn artist to other styles. How I would’ve liked him to transcend the styles and models of the Mongol, Chinese and Herat masters billeted deep in his soul, or even for him to forget about them entirely. When I told him this, he replied that like many miniaturists who’d moved from workshop to workshop and country to country, he’d forgotten these old styles, if he’d ever actually learned them. Though the value of many miniaturists resides precisely in the splendid models of form they’ve committed to memory, had Velijan truly forgotten them, he’d have become an even greater illustrator. Still, there were two benefits, of which he wasn’t even aware, to harboring the teachings of his mentors in the depths of his soul like a pair of unconfessed sins: 1. For such a gifted miniaturist, clinging to old forms inevitably stirred feelings of guilt and alienation that would spur his talent to maturity. 2. In a moment of difficulty, he could always recall what he claimed to have forgotten, and thus, he could successfully complete any new subject, history or scene by recourse to one of the old Herat models. With his keen eye, he knew how to harmonize what he’d learned from the old forms and Shah Tahmasp’s old masters in new pictures. Herat painting and Istanbul ornamentation happily merged in Olive.

As with all of my miniaturists, I once paid an unannounced visit to his home. Unlike my work area and that of many other master miniaturists, his was a filthy confusion of paints, brushes, burnishing shells, his folding worktable and other objects. It was a mystery to me, but he wasn’t even embarrassed by it. He took no outside jobs to earn a few extra silver coins. After I related these facts, Black said it was Olive who showed the most enthusiasm for and the most ease with the styles of the Frankish masters admired by his late Enishte. I understood this to be praise from the deceased fool’s point of view, mistaken though it was. I can’t say whether Olive was more deeply and secretly bound to the Herat styles-which went back to his father’s mentor Siyavush and Siyavush’s mentor Muzaffer, back to the era of Bihzad and the old masters-than he appeared to be, but it always made me wonder whether Olive harbored other hidden tendencies. Of my miniaturists (I told myself spontaneously), he was the most quiet and sensitive, but also the most guilty and traitorous, and by far the most devious. When I thought about the Commander’s torture chambers, he was the first to come to mind. (I both wanted and didn’t want him to be tortured.) He had the eyes of a jinn; he noticed and took account of everything, including my own shortcomings; however, with the reserve of an exile able to accommodate himself to any situation, he’d rarely open his mouth to point out mistakes. He was wily, yes, but not in my opinion a murderer. (I didn’t tell Black this.) Olive didn’t believe in anything. He had no faith in money, but he’d nervously squirrel it away. Contrary to what is commonly believed, all murderers are men of extreme faith rather than unbelievers. Manuscript illumination leads to painting, and painting, in turn, leads to-God forbid-challenging Allah. Everybody knows this. Therefore, to judge by his lack of faith, Olive is a genuine artist. Nevertheless, I believe that his God-given gifts fall short of Butterfly’s, or even Stork’s. I would’ve wanted Olive to be my son. As I said this, I wanted to incur Black’s jealousy, but he only responded by opening his dark eyes and staring with childlike curiosity. Then I said Olive was magnificent when he worked in black ink, when he rendered, for pasting in albums, warriors, hunting scenes, Chinese-inspired landscapes full of storks and cranes, pretty boys gathered beneath a tree reciting verse and playing lutes, and when he depicted the sorrow of legendary lovers, the wrath of a sword-bearing, enraged shah, and a hero’s expression of fear as he dodged the attack of a dragon.

“Perhaps Enishte wanted Olive to do the last picture that would show in great detail, in the style of the Europeans, Our Sultan’s face and manner of sitting,” Black said.

Was he trying to confuse me?

“Supposing this were the case, after Olive killed Enishte, why would he abscond with a picture he was already familiar with?” I said. “Or, if you like, why would he murder Enishte in order to see that picture?”

We both pondered these questions for a while.

“Because there’s something missing in that painting,” said Black. “Or because he regrets something he did and is scared by it. Or even…” he thought for a while. “Or, having killed Enishte, he might’ve taken the painting to do further harm, for the sake of having a memento, or even for no reason at all. Olive is, after all, a great illustrator who’d naturally have a lot of respect for a beautiful painting.”

“We’ve already discussed in what ways Olive is a great illustrator,” I said, growing angry. “But none of Enishte’s illustrations is beautiful.”

“We haven’t yet seen the last painting,” Black said boldly.

The Attributes of Butterfly

He is known as Hasan Chelebi from the Gunpowder Factory district, but to me he’s always been “Butterfly.” This nickname always reminds me of the beauty of his boyhood and youth: He was so handsome that those who saw him didn’t believe their eyes and wanted a second look. I’ve always been astonished by the miracle of his being as talented as he is handsome. He’s a master of color and this is his greatest strength; he painted passionately, reeling with the pleasure of applying color. But I cautioned Black that Butterfly was flighty, aimless and indecisive. Anxious to be just, I added: He’s a genuine miniaturist who paints from the heart. If the arts of ornamentation are not meant to cater to intelligence, to speak to the animal within us, or to bolster the pride of the Sultan; that is, if this art is meant to be only a festival for the eyes, then Butterfly is indeed a true miniaturist. He makes wide, easy, blithe curves, as if he’d taken lessons from the masters of Kazvin forty years ago; he confidently applies his bright, pure colors, and there’s always a gentle circularity hidden in the arrangement of his paintings; but I’m the one who trained him, not those long-dead masters of Kazvin. Maybe it’s for this reason that I love him like a son, nay, more than a son-but I never felt any awe toward him. As with all of my apprentices, in his boyhood and adolescence, I beat him freely with brush handles, rulers and even pieces of wood, but this doesn’t mean I don’t respect him. Though I beat Stork frequently with rulers, I respect him too. In contrast to what the casual onlooker might assume, a master’s beating doesn’t rid the young apprentice of jinns of talent and the Devil, but only suppresses them temporarily. If it happens to be a good beating, and deserved, later on the jinns and the Devil will rise up and stimulate the developing miniaturist’s resolve to work. As for the beatings I administered to Butterfly, they shaped him into a content and obedient artist.

I at once felt the need to praise him to Black: “Butterfly’s artistry,” I said, “is solid proof that the picture of bliss, which the celebrated poet ponders in his masnawi, is only possible through a God-given gift for understanding and applying color. When I realized this, I also realized what Butterfly lacked: He hadn’t known that momentary loss of faith that Jami refers to in his poetry as ”the dark night of the soul.“ Like an illustrator painting in the great happiness of Heaven, he sets to his work with conviction and contentment, believing that he can make a blissful painting, which he does succeed in doing. Our armies besieging Doppio castle, the Hungarian ambassador kissing the feet of Our Sultan, Our Prophet ascending through the seven heavens, these are of course all inherently happy scenes, but rendered by Butterfly, they become flights of ecstasy springing from the page. In an illustration of mine, if the darkness of death or the seriousness of a government session weighs heavy, I’ll tell Butterfly to ”color it as you see fit,“ and thereupon, the outfits, leaves, flags and sea that lay there muted as if sprinkled with dirt meant to fill a grave begin to ripple in the breeze. There are times when I think Allah wants the world to be seen the way Butterfly illustrates it, that He wants life to be jubilation. Indeed, this is a realm where colors harmoniously recite magnificent ghazals to each other, where time stops, where the Devil never appears.”

However, even Butterfly knows this isn’t enough. Someone must have quite rightly-yes, in good measure-whispered to him that in his work everything was as joyous as a holiday, but devoid of depth. Child princes and senile old harem women on the verge of death enjoy his paintings, not men of the world forced to struggle with evil. Because Butterfly is well aware of these criticisms, poor man, he at times grows jealous of average miniaturists who though much less talented than he are possessed of demons and jinns. What he mistakenly believes to be devilry and the work of jinns is more often than not straightforward evil and envy.

He aggravates me because when he paints, he doesn’t lose himself in that wondrous world, surrendering to its ecstasy, but only reaches that height when he imagines his work will please others. He aggravates me because he thinks about the money he’ll earn. It’s another of life’s ironies: There are many artists with much less talent yet more able than Butterfly to surrender themselves to their art.

In his need to make up for his shortcomings, Butterfly is preoccupied with proving that he has sacrificed himself to art. Like those birdbrained miniaturists who paint on fingernails and pieces of rice, pictures almost invisible to the naked eye, he’s engrossed with minute and delicate craftsmanship. I’d once asked him whether he gave himself over to this ambition, which has blinded many illustrators at an early age, because he was ashamed of the excessive talent Allah had granted him. Only inept miniaturists paint each leaf of a tree they’ve drawn on a grain of rice to make an easy name for themselves and to gain importance in the eyes of dense patrons.

Butterfly’s inclination to design and illustrate for other people’s pleasure rather than for his own, his uncontrollable need to please others, made him, more than any of the others, a slave to praise. And so it follows that an uncertain Butterfly wants to ensure his standing by becoming Head Illuminator. It was Black who had raised this subject.

“Yes,” I said, “I know he’s been scheming to succeed me after I die.”

“Do you think this would drive him to murder his miniaturist brethren?”

“It might. He’s a great master, but he’s not aware of this, and he can’t leave the world behind when he paints.”

I said this, whereupon I grasped that in truth I, too, wanted Butterfly to assume leadership of the workshop after me. I couldn’t trust Olive, and in the end Stork would unwittingly become slave to the Venetian style. Butterfly’s need to be admired-I was upset at the thought that he could take a life-would be vital in handling both the workshop and the Sultan. Only Butterfly’s sensitivity and faith in his own palette could resist the Venetian artistry that duped the viewer by trying to depict reality itself rather than its representation, in all its detail: pictures, shadows included, of cardinals, bridges, rowboats, candlesticks, churches and stables, oxen and carriage wheels, as if all of them were of the same importance to Allah.

“Was there ever a time when you visited him unannounced as you had with the others?”

“Whosoever looks upon Butterfly’s work will quickly sense that he understands the value of love as well as the meaning of heartfelt joy and sorrow. But as with all lovers of color, he gets carried away with his emotions and is fickle. Because I was so enamored of his God-given and miraculous talent, of his sensitivity to color, I paid close attention to him in his youth and know everything there is to know about him. Of course, in such situations, the other miniaturists quickly become jealous and the master-disciple relationship becomes strained and damaged. There were many moments of love during which Butterfly did not fear what others might say. Recently, since he married the neighborhood fruit seller’s pretty daughter, I’ve neither felt the desire to go see him, nor have I had the chance.”

“Rumor has it that he’s in league with the followers of the Hoja from Erzurum,” Black said. “They say he stands to gain a lot if the Hoja and his men declare certain works incompatible with religion, and thereby, outlaw our books-which depict battles, weapons, bloody scenes and routine ceremonies, not to mention parades including everyone from chefs to magicians, dervishes to boy dancers, and kebab makers to locksmiths-and confine us to the subjects and forms of the old Persian masters.”

“Even if we returned skillfully and victoriously to those wondrous paintings of Tamerlane’s time, even if we returned to that life and vocation in all its minutia-as bright Stork would best be able to do after me-in the final analysis, all of it’ll be forgotten,” I said mercilessly, “because everybody will want to paint like the Europeans.”

Did I actually believe these words of damnation?

“My Enishte believed the same,” Black confessed meekly, “yet it filled him with hope.”

The Attributes of Stork

I’ve seen him sign his name as the Sinning Painter Mustafa Chelebi. Without paying any mind to whether he had or ought to have a style, whether it should be identified with a signature or, like the old masters, remain anonymous, or whether or not a humble bearing required one to do so, he’d just sign his name with a smile and a victorious flourish.

He continued bravely down the path I’d set him on and committed to paper what none before him had been able to. Like myself, he too would watch master glassblowers turning their rods and blowing glass melted in ovens to make blue pitchers and green bottles; he saw the leather, needles and wooden molds of the shoemakers who bent with rapt attention over the shoes and boots they made; a horse swing tracing a graceful arc during a holiday festival; a press squeezing oil from seeds; the firing of our cannon at the enemy; and the screws and the barrels of our guns. He saw these things and painted them without objecting that the old masters of Tamerlane’s time, or the legendary illustrators of Tabriz and Kazvin, hadn’t lowered themselves to do so. He was the first Muslim miniaturist to go to war and return safe and sound, in preparation for the Book of Victories that he would later illustrate. He was the first to eagerly study enemy fortresses, cannon, armies, horses with bleeding wounds, injured soldiers struggling for their lives and corpses-all with the intent to paint.

I recognize his work from his subject matter more than his style and from his attention to obscure details more than his subject matter. I could entrust him with complete peace of mind to execute all aspects of a painting, from the arrangement of pages and their composition to the coloring of the most trivial details. In this regard, he has the right to succeed me as Head Illuminator. But he’s so ambitious and conceited, and so condescending toward the other illustrators that he could never manage so many men, and would end up losing them all. Actually, if it were left to him, with his incredible industriousness, he’d simply make all the illustrations in the workshop himself. If he put his mind to such a task, he could in fact succeed. He’s a great master. He knows his craft. He admires himself. How nice for him.

When I visited him unannounced once, I caught him at work. Resting upon folding worktables, desks and cushions were all the pages he was working on: illustrations for Our Sultan’s books, for me, for miserable costume books that he dashed off for foolish European travelers eager to belittle us, one page of a triptych he was making for a pasha who thought highly of himself, images to be pasted in albums, pages made for his own pleasure and even a vulgar rendition of coitus. Tall, thin Stork was flitting from one illustration to the next like a bee among flowers, singing folk songs, tweaking the cheek of his apprentice who was mixing paint and adding a comic twist to the painting he was working on before showing it to me with a smug chuckle. Unlike my other miniaturists, he didn’t stop working in a ceremonial show of respect when I arrived; on the contrary, he happily exhibited the swift exercise of his God-given talent and the skill he’d acquired through hard work (he could do the work of seven or eight miniaturists at the same time). Now, I catch myself secretly thinking that if the vile murderer is one of my three master miniaturists, I hope to God it’s Stork. During his apprenticeship, the sight of him at my door on Friday mornings didn’t excite me the way Butterfly did on his day.

Since he paid equal attention to every odd detail, with no basis of discrimination except that it be visible, his aesthetic approach resembled that of the Venetian masters. But unlike them, my ambitious Stork neither saw nor depicted people’s faces as individual or distinct. I assume, since he either openly or secretly belittled everyone, that he didn’t consider faces important. I’m certain deceased Enishte didn’t appoint him to draw Our Sultan’s face.

Even when depicting a subject of the utmost importance, he couldn’t keep from situating a skeptical dog somewhere at some distance from the event, or drawing a disgraceful beggar whose misery demeaned the wealth and extravagance of a ceremony. He had enough self-confidence to mock whatever illustration he made, its subject and himself.

“Elegant Effendi’s murder resembles the way Joseph’s brothers tossed him into a well out of jealousy,” said Black. “And my Enishte’s death resembles the unforeseen murder of Hüsrev at the hands of his son who had his heart set on Hüsrev’s wife, Shirin. Everyone says that Stork loved to paint scenes of war and gruesome depictions of death.”

“Anyone who thinks an illuminator resembles the subject of the picture he paints doesn’t understand me or my master miniaturists. What exposes us is not the subject, which others have commissioned from us-these are always the same anyway-but the hidden sensibilities we include in the painting as we render that subject: A light that seems to radiate from within the picture, a palpable hesitancy or anger one notices in the composition of figures, horses and trees, the desire and sorrow emanating from a cypress as it reaches to the heavens, the pious resignation and patience that we introduce into the illustration when we ornament wall tiles with a fervor that tempts blindness…Yes, these are our hidden traces, not those identical horses all in a row. When a painter renders the fury and speed of a horse, he doesn’t paint his own fury and speed; by trying to make the perfect horse, he reveals his love for the richness of this world and its creator, displaying the colors of a passion for life-only that and nothing more.”