Harvard Gazette: Small is beautiful

A well-designed museum exhibition can open windows on unfamiliar worlds. At a new exhibition at the Sackler Museum, viewers can glimpse a large, complex, and fascinating world through some rather small windows.

The exhibition is called "Closely Focused, Intensely Felt: Selections from the Norma Jean Calderwood Collection of Islamic Art." Calderwood, a scholar and collector of Islamic art, assembled her collection of ceramics, works on paper, lacquer ware, and other objects from 1968 to 1998 during numerous visits to the Middle East. Her husband, Stanford Calderwood, a former executive at Polaroid and a generous patron of the arts, gave the collection of 173 objects to Harvard in 2002.

Mary McWilliams, the Norma Jean Calderwood Curator of Islamic and Later Indian Art, arranged the exhibition, which features about a quarter of the collection. McWilliams is working on a catalog of the entire collection, which she hopes to finish in 2005.

Calderwood, who conducted graduate work in art history and Persian language at Harvard and taught Islamic and Asian art at Boston College, concentrated her collecting efforts on Persian or "Persianate" art, a designation that includes not only modern Iran but parts of Iraq, Uzbekistan, and Afghanistan. The objects in the collection span 1,000 years, from ninth century ceramics to 19th century lacquer ware. In their changing styles one can see the impact of successive dynasties, foreign invasions, and religious and cultural borrowings. A comparable span of European art might begin with the Irish Book of Kells and end with the French Impressionists.

But while the spatial and temporal fields may be broad, the artistic objects representing them are mostly small, subtle, and delicate, requiring close examination, sometimes with the aid of a magnifying glass, in order to appreciate them fully.

The ceramics, most of which were acquired by Calderwood during the early years of her collecting career, show how seemingly modest works of art can provide keys to important historical and cultural processes. These little bowls, dishes, and tiles, some from as early as the ninth century, represent the work of Persian potters at the forefront of their craft, producing luxury wares for a wealthy and aristocratic clientele. The collection includes several examples of lusterware from Basra - products of a complicated, closely guarded process by which oxides of precious metals were incorporated into the glaze, giving the pieces an iridescent glow, somewhat faded now after more than a millennium.

The 'Large Dish With Peonies' is dated circa 1475. The fritware dish with underglaze painting measures 7.8 by 43 centimeters. (Photo by Junius Beebe/HUAM © President and Fellows of Harvard College)

Other pieces, called epigraphic wares, contain some of the earliest examples of Hadith - sayings and anecdotes associated with the Prophet Muhammad that were collected by scholars in the early centuries of Islam. Because the writings on paper and parchment from this era have almost all been destroyed, particularly during the Mongol invasions of the early 13th century, the sayings inscribed on these epigraphic wares represent the earliest examples of this important religious literature.

During the later Saljuq period (11th-12th centuries), potters working in several Persian cities produced ceramics that are today celebrated for their variety, technical virtuosity, and sophistication. One tiny but striking example of such artistry is a fragment of a tile showing a pair of lovers sleeping cozily together, their round faces pressed against one another in a way that almost reminds one of Plato's myth of androgynous humans sliced in two by Zeus and striving incessantly to reunite. A line of Arabic love poetry surrounds the intricately painted image but unfortunately gives no hint of the identity of the pair.

'Penbox With Flowers, Birds, and Portraits,' 1873, is pasteboard with painting under lacquer and measures 4 by 21.7 by 3.3 centimeters. (Photo by Junius Beebe/HUAM © President and Fellows of Harvard College)

Calderwood became interested in works on paper around the time she began graduate study at Harvard, and, according to McWilliams, her collecting in this area reflects her deepening knowledge of Islamic art.

One of the finest pieces in the collection is a page from an edition of the "Shahnama" (Book of Kings), an epic poem of 60,000 couplets describing the semimythic struggle of rival families to occupy the Persian throne. This 16th century edition of the poem was produced in Tabriz for Shah Tahmasp I and represents the most accomplished and luxurious form of Persian manuscript illustration. It has been owned by the sultan of the Ottoman Empire and by the Rothschild family until it was finally dispersed among museums and collectors around the world.

The painting shows two leaders, Afrasiyab and Siyavush, embracing, signaling a truce between their warring factions. Calderwood seems to have been particularly interested in the story of the doomed Siyavush, who was later killed by his rival.

Manuscripts produced by the royal workshops of Tabriz enjoy great prestige among collectors of Persian painting, but as Calderwood's knowledge grew, she began branching out into less well-known areas. Among these were works produced in Shiraz, a center for the production of illustrated manuscripts from the 14th to the 16th century, but one that has been less studied by scholars.

One particular 16th century Shiraz edition of the "Shahnama" became a focus of her collecting efforts. Calderwood acquired more than 30 pages from the manuscript, including a colophon page identifying the scribe as the celebrated Muhammad al-Qivam. A dozen pages from this manuscript can be seen in the exhibition.

"Museums and collectors are often blamed for breaking up manuscripts," McWilliams said. "She was trying to put this book back together."

Other Shiraz paintings on view in the exhibition include an illustration of the Mi'raj, Muhammad's miraculous journey to heaven on the mystical steed Buraq in which the Prophet, surrounded by a flaming halo, soars through realms of blue and gold surrounded by brightly dressed angels. Another 16th century Shiraz painting shows Solomon, a figure as important to Islam as he is to Judaism and Christianity, enthroned amid earthly and divine attendants and surrounded by animals and birds that are said to have bowed to his authority.

McWilliams said that one of the things she has enjoyed most about working with the collection is trying to figure out the ideas that motivated Calderwood's purchasing decisions.

"In this case, I think she was trying to show something of the evolution of Shiraz painting," McWilliams said.

Small is beautiful

Islamic collection opens windows on a fascinating world