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Shaykhi
Shaykhi worked in Tabriz at the court of the Aq Qoyunlu rulers in the last quarter of the 15th century, and his name appears under the miniatures of a single manuscript: the Khamsa of Nizami with a colophon dated 1481. He came from Herat but painted differently from the Herat school of Bihzad, with dense greenery and sharp colours. No dates of his life survive.
Biography
The manuscript of Nizami’s Khamsa that carries Shaykhi’s name changed hands almost as often as it gained miniatures. It was commissioned by the Timurid prince Abul Qasim Babur, who ruled from 1449 to 1457, from the well-known calligrapher Azhar. The prince died, and the book was left unfinished.
A year after the Kara Koyunlu leader Jahanshah took Herat, the manuscript came to his son Pir Budaq. It then passed to the Aq Qoyunlu ruler Sultan Khalil. He commissioned the calligrapher Abd al-Rahman al-Khwarazmi to complete the text, and two painters, Shaykhi and Darvish Muhammad, to illustrate it with miniatures. In 1478 Sultan Khalil died, and the book went to his brother Yaqub. By some accounts Sultan Khalil was killed by that same brother; others do not mention it. Yaqub died in 1490. Accounts of the manuscript’s completion differ: according to the colophon it was finished in 1481, still under Yaqub; by other accounts it was completed only under the founder of the Safavid dynasty, Shah Ismail I, who ruled from 1501 to 1524.
Of Shaykhi himself there are almost no documents: no year of birth, no year of death, no place where he died. It is known that he came from Herat and worked in Tabriz. Some sources call him Ustad Shaykhi Naqqash or Shaykhi al-Yaqubi, that is, “Shaykhi of Yaqub”, after his patron. His name as the author of miniatures is linked with a single manuscript, and, I think, on that basis it is hard to say anything about his path before Tabriz. The most painterly miniatures of the Khamsa are attributed to him, and they were made in the 1480s, when the work was paid for by Sultan Yaqub. They probably reflect the patron’s taste. Among the folios added under Yaqub are named 51v, 69, 82v, 163v, 167, 171v, 177v, 180v, 183 and 187. One of the best-known miniatures of this group is “Bahram Gur in the Green Pavilion”, attributed to Shaykhi. The Herat manner of Bihzad relied on a balanced palette. Shaykhi’s landscape is richer and denser: acid greens and vivid blues, and abundant vegetation that seems to engulf the figures. Scholars speak of the “ecstatic intensity” of this style.
He is also credited with paintings in a Chinese manner, some of which bear his signature: “Two Young Women in Chinese Style Costume Seated on a Sofa” and “Nobles beneath a Blossoming Branch”.
Shaykhi’s manner pleased Shah Ismail I, and it was continued in the work of Sultan Muhammad, a major Persian painter of the next generation.
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