Brushwork in Persianate Painting of Fifteenth Century: Its Relation to China

Generally acknowledged, unlike Chinese ink and brush painting that emphasizes “the dynamic ink line which describes volume and motion”, Persianate painting usually favors a sober weighted line even in rarely-coloured drawings such as those in the style of sīyāh-qalam. This aesthetic difference has a probable root of materiality: pre-modern Persian artists predominantly rely on pen (qalam) in spite of their simultaneous use of brush. However, owing to the extensive interaction of Persia with China in the fourteenth-fifteenth centuries, Chinese freehand brushwork (xieyi, 写意) became available to Persian artists in Central Asia and Iran, as suggested by a few of the drawings assembled in contemporary and later albums in Berlin and Istanbul.

To what extent the Chinese freehand style impacts the Persianate aesthetic of brushstroke, or line in general, is thus a question that needs to be answered. This paper proposes a tentative study of the emergence of “Persianate ink and brush painting” as a visual genre in the fifteenth century and its relation to Chinese. It addresses two key issues: first, the mode in the transmission of Chinese Yuan-Ming literati/Chan paintings to Central Asia and Iran; second, the process of negotiation between the two distinct technical and aesthetic traditions, especially the Persianate reception, appreciation and/or resistance of Chinese freehand brushwork. Furthermore, focusing on the ink line, one crucial element defining a style, this paper seeks to investigate the impact of Chinese freehand brushwork on the emergence of Persianate drawing a mature performative, rather than preparatory, art.