- Title
- Standing Figure
- Date Made
- about 1620
- Medium
- Ink, opaque watercolor and gold on paper
- Dimensions
- 5 3/4 × 3 in. (14.61 × 7.62 cm)
Frame: 20 × 15 × 1 1/2 in. (50.8 × 38.1 × 3.81 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.73.5.477
- Collecting Area
- Art of the Middle East: Islamic
- Curatorial Notes
In Persian lyric poetry, the beloved is traditionally described as young and beautiful, with a body like a gently swaying cypress, eyebrows arched like two bows, and lips tightly puckered like a rosebud. The beloved’s gender is, however, often left unspecified. The figure portrayed in this seventeenth-century album painting from Iran closely conforms to the physical ideal described by poets, and in step with the poetic tradition, the artist seems to have left the subject’s gender deliberately vague.
