SAFAVID TABRIZ, IRAN, FIRST HALF 16TH CENTURY

The subject of two camels is well known in Persian and Indian painting. It received its most famous treatment on a painting attributed to Bihzad in the Gulistan Palace Museum library, Tehran, dated to the final years of the artist’s life (Ebadollah Bahari, Bihzad: Master of Persian painting, London, 1996, p.216). It is believed that this painting found its way to India with the artists who left Shah Tahmasp’s court to work for the Mughal emperor Humayun, where ‘Abd al-Samad painted his own interpretation of the scene around the year 1590. Consequently, paintings of camel fights are often assumed to have been inspired by Bihzad.

The motif, however, is much older than Bihzad: depictions of camels locked in combat, often biting each other’s haunches, can be seen on bronze plaques excavated in Central Asia, which date from between the 6^th and 4^th centuries BC (Adel T. Adamova, The Iconography of a Camel Fight, Muqarnas, issue 21, 2004, p.11). A closer prototype for the present composition, where one camel seems to be trampling another, can be found in an unfinished sketch in the Diez album, which has been attributed to the 15^th century (Adel T. Adamova, op.cit., p.8). Bizhad’s influence, however, can be seen in the presence of the two figures, one of who wears a Safavid-style turban which gives away the painting’s Persian origin. It is perhaps not clear if they are struggling to keep their camels apart or – potentially – goading them on.