- Title
- Execution Scene, Folio from a Shahnama (Book of Kings)
- Date Made
- circa 1450
- Medium
- Opaque watercolor and gold on paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 7 1/16 x 7 in. (17.9388 x 17.78 cm); Sheet: 10 1/16 x 9 13/16 in. (25.5588 x 24.9238 cm)
- Accession Number
- M.85.189
- Collecting Area
- South and Southeast Asian Art
- Curatorial Notes
The Shahnama (Book of Kings) is an epic Persian poem composed by Firdausi (or Ferdowsi; circa 934-1020) in circa 977-1010. It narrates the legendary and historical past of the Persian Empire until the Arab Muslim conquest in the 7th century. Shahnama manuscripts were frequently produced throughout the Islamic world, including in South Asia. This folio is from a Shahnama that was dispersed in the early 1900s. Additional folios are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (20.120.239 and 20.120.241) and Harvard Art Museums (1919.137).
Here, two men hung upside down from a gibbet are being shot with arrows by archers galloping on horseback. Neither the prisoners’ identity nor the specific incident can be determined because the painting has been detached from its text and remounted. A similar scene of two lifeless men hanging upside down from gallows, albeit without the mounted archers or protruding arrows in the corpses, depicts the execution of two murderers by Alexander the Great (Iskandar) in a Shahnama of 1482 from Shiraz, Iran, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (40.38.1). Another similar scene of two dead men hung by the neck from gibbets and shot by archers on foot by the Sasanian King Ardeshir (r. 224-242) is in a Shahnama of 1486 from Shiraz, now in the Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art (MSS 713, fol. 437v). Neither scene matches the LACMA painting, in which the men are still alive, indicated by their open eyes, and the execution is underway.
- Selected Bibliography
Pal, Pratapaditya, Thomas W. Lentz, Sheila R. Canby, Edwin Binney, 3rd, Walter B. Denny, and Stephen Markel. "Arts from Islamic Cultures: Los Angeles County Museum of Art." Arts of Asia 17, no. 6 (November/December 1987): 73-130.
