century, to those delicious years when the old tradition,
though weakened, had not been smothered under the scenic delicacies
brought into fashion by Behzad. If the Timourid age is to be dubbed the
Persian _quattrocento_, Mr. Ruck's man will pass muster as the
counterpart of some artist older than Raphael, who worked independently
of the young prodigy unaffected by his ultimately disastrous inventions.

From an album, also in the possession of Mr. Arthur Ruck, comes a
drawing signed by Behzad and reproduced on Plate II, c. On the
genuineness of the signature I cannot pretend to an opinion, but there
seem to be no solid grounds for disputing it. The work itself is
characteristic enough. It is accomplished and tasteful; it is also thin
in quality and the forms are indifferently co-ordinated. It is, in
fact, a very pretty piece of illustration; it is not a profoundly moving
design. Compared with figure A on Plate I it is tight and unlovely:
compared with the masterpieces of the thirteenth century it is not even
what a picture by Raphael is to a picture by Giotto; if, historically,
Behzad is the Raphael of Persia, aesthetically, he is a very inferior
one.

It is in the post-Behzad art, their Sefevaean art of the sixteenth
century, that the Persians have the advantage of us. The miniatures of
this age were, until lately, reckoned by European collectors the
masterpieces of Persian painting, and the decline of their reputation
may be compared with that of those later _cinquecentiste_ who stood so
high in the taste of the eighteenth century. The descent, however, has
been less sharp as the error was less glaring. After Behzad there is no
such tumble as befell Italian art in the last days of the Renaissance.
On the contrary, as my final illustrations (also drawn from Mr. Ruck's
scrap-book) show, the Persian art of the sixteenth century maintained a
very high level. The ladder picture (Plate III, D) is, I presume, by
Sultan Mohamed. For my part I prefer it to the Behzad. It is less
mechanical; and I find in it none of that weary pomposity, that gesture
of the great man who knows his business too well, which so often
displeases me in the master. Sultan Mohamed was, so the story goes, a
pupil of Aga Mirek, who was a pupil of Behzad.

This charming Sultan Mohamed belongs to the middle of the sixteenth
century, and its companion illustration (Plate III, E) may be placed
some twenty years later. About this last, however, it would b