2-737-644 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Persian Couplets (recto); Sleeping Youth (verso), late 1500s-early 1600s. Under Shah Abbas, the tradition in which painting was employed to illustrate a literary work was all but abandoned. In its place came a new concern with single-page illustrations, such as this one, which have no specirfic content or meaning. They often illustrate albums of collections of verses about love and beauty, in which these themes often appear to serve as allegories of things divine.