Where Was the Portrait of Ulugh Beg Painted?

Abstract

The fifteenth century was the golden age of miniature painting. This is strikingly illustrated by the survival both of written sources describing the development of the art and of the miniatures themselves.Various Soviet Scholars including A. A. Semenov, G. A. Pugachenkova, V. G. Dolinskaya, O. I. Galerkina, N. V. Diakonova, O. F. Akimushkin, and A. A. Ivanov, as well as the present writer, have all worked on the problem of the development of the Central Asian miniature. Thanks to their studies, the outline of the Samarqand miniature, something unknown not long ago, has gradually begun to emerge. The issue of the Samarqand miniature has not yet been fully resolved and many problems still remain. These include the difficulties of access to the miniatures themselves which are kept in various libraries, museums, and private collections around the world and the fact that the vast majority have not been published.