Cultural exchange and iconographic borrowings in Ilkhanid painting

This thesis examines how the Ilkhanid dynasty, a cultural crossroad during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, integrated Persian, Islamic, Armenian, and Byzantine traditions using art as a tool to forge political and cultural identity. The Jami al Tawarikh (Compendium of Chronicles), a monumental manuscript commissioned by the Ilkhanid ruler Ghazan Khan and written by the Vizier Rashid al-Din, is a case study. Following the Mongol rulers' conversion to Islam under Ghazan Khan (r.1295-1304), the Ilkhanid court had influences from both Muslim and Christian traditions. This study analyses how Ilkhanids employed artistic representations to construct a new cultural and political identity, particularly through the visual and textual narratives in the Jami al-Tawarikh. This illustrated manuscript merges Mongols' religious and artistic understanding with Persian, Islamic, and Christian art. The manuscript's comparative analysis of religious scenes, Jami al-Tawarikh, emphasizes shared Abrahamic narratives and iconographic parallels with contemporaneous Armenian and Byzantine churches and manuscripts in medieval Anatolia. This study demonstrates the fluidity of artistic borrowing across religious boundaries and underlines the significant cultural exchanges between these two Christian entities in Anatolia and the Ilkhanids. Moreover, the thesis explores the pivotal role of Rashid al-Din and Rab-i Rashidi workshop in creating and disseminating Jami al-Tawarikh. Rashid al-Din's cultural and religious background and scholarly vision shaped the manuscript's illustrations, guiding their interpretation of historical and religious narratives. This master's thesis contributes new dimensions to the studies of Jami al-Tawarikh in terms of emphasizing the two leading Christian entities' role in transitioning the Christian iconography in Anatolia to the Ilkhanid court, which is the distinguishing part of the thesis considering the recent Ilkhanid studies since most of the publications partly indicates these similarities. It aims to reveal the political and cultural exchanges and artistic borrowings taken from Anatolia's Byzantine and Armenian arts and how the Ilkhanids created a new Islamic genre and blended iconography through the religious representations of the Jami al-Tawarikh.