One Thousand and One Conjectures

Which Shahnama episodes got painted is normally explained by narrative salience and patron taste. In commercial production the causality should often run the other way: painting spaces were reserved at ruling time, spread across the planned quires so a buyer flipping the…

That illustrated books survive preferentially is doctrine; the sharper, unestablished claim is that survival and integrity anticorrelate through the dealer's knife. Every painting is a separable asset, so the hazard of dismemberment grows with painting count, and the market leaves a dose-response…

Bestiary images descend copy by copy, but the copyist's eye corrects toward nature only where nature is available: a fox or hedgehog is re-anchored by daily perception, while a crocodile, whale, or bonnacon is pure graphic descent with no external referent. Iconographic…

Medieval painters had almost no access to antique painting or free-standing portrait sculpture, but Roman coins passed through their world by the thousand. If coinage was the operative model medium for picturing antiquity, ancient rulers should be drawn in strict numismatic profile…

In Byzantium the coin was the fastest image medium the court controlled: dies were recut within months, while mosaics, ivories, and books ran on multi-year project cycles. Innovations in imperial iconography — new crown forms, loros arrangements, newly court-adopted Christ and Virgin…

Rubbed-out faces in Persian and Arabic figural manuscripts are usually narrated as diffuse pious attrition accumulating across many readers. If that were so, defacement per manuscript would spread smoothly with use. But if defacement is typically one owner's single campaign through the…

Gothic Passion diptychs were serial products of Parisian workshops. If scene selection were devotionally bespoke, observed combinations would spread across the combinatorial space of available scenes; if workshop-standardized, they collapse into a few fixed menus, and menu identity should track workshop groups…

Ornament in stained glass — border types, diaper grounds, grisaille foliage — is studied inside glass scholarship, but glaziers stocked their cartoon chests from painters' books. Ornament families should therefore appear in dated manuscripts before dated glass of the same region, with…

Donor portraiture is one genre under two theologies of presence. Latin donation imagery kept renegotiating scale as lay patronage broadened and purgatorial accounting personalized the stakes; the Byzantine proskynesis format was liturgically frozen. The handbook impression that donors get bigger is not…

Chinese connoisseurship separates traced copies (mo) from freehand copies (lin) by brush quality — a judgement call. But tracing is mechanical transfer and locks absolute dimensions, while freehand copying rescales freely. Catalogue metadata alone should therefore bifurcate attested copy-pairs into a size-locked…

Collector seals accumulate on Chinese paintings for centuries, and their placement is discussed as taste. The conjecture: placement obeys an interstitial packing rule — each collector takes the best remaining slot in a stable preference order, corners of the image proper first,…

That Japanese handscroll action tends right-to-left is a specialist commonplace; the unestablished claim is the full mechanism test across cultures. If lateral bias comes from the reading technology — the image must hand the eye onward to the next scene — then…