In this iconic moment of love at first sight from the story of “Layla and Majnun” by Nizami (d. 1209), the titular characters meet at school. The students appear hard at work as they follow their instructor through illuminated alphabet primers. As the text relates, the pair fall for one another as they exchange glances while their classmates toil over forming their letters. In this illustration, architectural elements cohesively merge components of text and image, so that the whole composition cleverly invokes the built structure of the school. Four columns of text at top and bottom frame the classroom, further demarcating interior space into three sections: a doorway opening onto a garden on the right, a mihrab (prayer niche) on the left, and a tall central zone accented by an illuminated lamp in a niche or the interior of the dome, which rises to form the outer tower. Two figures, possibly a young prince and his companion, walk in the margins as if exiting the school structure.

Although the tale takes place among Bedouin tribes of medieval Arabia, Shirazi artists have skillfully reimagined this school setting to reflect their own visual landscape of sixteenth-century Iran; this merging of past and present is a common feature of Persian manuscript illustration. The tile-lined walls and illuminated lamp niches closely fit the ornamental programs of structures patronized by late Timurid and early Safavid royalty. The costumes of the teacher and students also have analogs in contemporaneous paintings depicting elite Iranian youths. It is likely that the pair of children facing one another in the center represent Layla in orange and Qays (Majnun) in his distinctive blue robes. Over the course of the tale, Qays progressively loses his mind over the separation from his beloved Layla, eventually earning the title, “Majnun Layla,” literally meaning “possessed-by /driven crazy for Layla.”

The tale predates Nizami’s renowned rendition, seen here, stretching back to the earliest Bedouin ‘Udhri poems of unrequited love from the late seventh to eighth centuries, which sparked numerous adaptations among Umayyad courtly writers. The romance also became intertwined with Sufi concepts of love, the annihilation of the ego/self, and madness, seen in the mystic poems of al-Sarraj (d. 988) among others. By the early sixteenth-century, numerous copies of Nizami’s Khamsa were illustrated by elite Persianate workshops, including those in Shiraz, Iran. The region’s commercial production of high-end manuscripts was bustling at the end of the fifteenth century and continued through the late sixteenth century. This folio forms part of a group of loose leaves from the same Shirazi manuscript dated to 1517 by the scribe Muhammad Zarin-Qalam on the colophon (see: M.73.5.604). Produced in the early years of Safavid rule, the folios highlight the luxurious production elements that would grow and develop in subsequent decades under the support of Turkman Zu’lqadir governors, characterized by skillful illumination, intricate depictions of architectural details and material worlds, framed within complex compositions that experimented with text and image relations.