Mead Audio Tours Here, Zah-hak—with a black snake protruding from each shoulder because of a curse—appears surrounded by the great sages he has called to interpret a dream of his demise. The floor and roof of his pavilion incorporate patterns of six-pointed stars and hexagons, motifs that gained popularity in Persian architecture in part because they created an interesting design requiring only two molds. The fine details in gold paint could have been made using a reed pen or perhaps with paper stencils that were invented in the sixteenth century. The pages of this illuminated manuscript were separated and dispersed long before this leaf came to the Mead; eight pages from the same manuscript, possibly painted by the same (unidentified) artist, are now in the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts. |
