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…

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…

Pattern sheets travelled as outline drawings with colour given verbally — the Göttingen Model Book literally writes out its recipes — while copying from a finished exemplar transmits paint by eye but forces a freehand redraw. Two transmission channels, opposite bandwidths: model-book…

Chrysography and gold-leaf image grounds drew on the same budget line, the same material stock, and the same specialist hours, and they address different audiences — the reader and the beholder. The naive luxury model says richer books have more of both;…

Byzantine book epigrams praising gold letters, silver covers, and purple leaves are conventionally read as rhetorical topoi. But the verses were commissioned as part of the same donation package as the decoration, and a donor recording a gift before God has audit…

Al-Sufi's Book of Fixed Stars transmits each constellation in two mirror parities — as seen in the sky and as on the celestial globe — and copies differ in how the pairing survives. Painters copy their exemplar's pictures, so parity should be…

Double-page Qur'an frontispieces are designed as mirror twins but executed in sequence by the same team, and fatigue plus deadline land on whichever page came second. If workshops shared a standard order of operations — something no surviving treatise records — then…

Insular interlace obeys strict under-over alternation, and its rare violations are treated as random lapses. The conjecture: the slips are structural — they concentrate where the drawing process broke off, at panel joins, pigment-field boundaries, and day-work seams — so error positions…

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…

The deluxe illuminated copy and the textually best copy of a work are systematically different books: illumination routes production through commercial ateliers optimizing appearance, schedule, and a lay patron's ear — smoothing hard readings as they go — while plain copies made…

Bas-de-page drolleries look like free invention scattered at whim, but the planner's and patron's attention concentrated at the liturgical divisions, where the opening had to perform. If marginal invention is budgeted attention rather than a programme, drollery density and inventiveness should decay…

When western Indian manuscript production moved from palm leaf to paper, pages kept palm-leaf proportions and painted vestigial string-hole medallions — that much is known. The unestablished structure is the shedding schedule: vestiges should die in a fixed order, the functional trace…

Mixtec screenfold painters worked along red guide-lined boustrophedon registers laid out before painting. If composition ran on a short planning horizon, spacing should compress as the painter approaches each register turn — the same crowding-at-the-end signature papyrologists read in line justification —…

Whether Maya codex production divided glyphic and pictorial labour is unresolved. The conjecture: it did not — each glyphically identified scribal hand painted its own deity images, so a hand's iconographic micro-habits (the drawing of God B's eye, ear-ornament forms, foot rendering)…