Wall paintings showing thematic compositions, and also sculpture, were commonly included in the interior decor of both secular and religious buildings in Central Asia during the pre-Islamic period. However, the arrival of Islam brought about changes in the nature of religious buildings and palaces which, together with religious prohibitions, led to changes in the forms and stylistic features of both sculpture and wall painting. This process, which developed variously in different regions of the Islamic world, continued for many decades.

The wall paintings and sculptures discovered in the palaces of the eighth to the ninth century near Samarkand (Panjikent, Afrasiab), Bukhara (Varakhsha) and Nishapur represent the splendid swansong of the representational arts of early medieval Sogdia and Iran. In the Sasanian period, when glorification of the legendary and epic past was encouraged, the interiors of palaces were still being decorated with paintings and sculptured reliefs illustrating hunting scenes, royal receptions (Fig. 10) and epic themes recalling the lives of ancient kings, as witness the paintings from Afrasiab and Varakhsha. The motifs of Sasanian art are encountered in mural compositions and stucco carvings of the eighth and ninth centuries discovered in the remains of Islamic palace buildings of Nishapur. A traditional hunting scene is depicted on a fragment of wall painting but the appearance of different figures and attributes must be viewed as a concession to the new era. Instead of the lion hunts favoured by the Sasanians, the picture shows a horseman with a hawk on his forearm: his prey is a hare. The grand, monumental quality of Sasanian art gives place to the stylized decorative compositions of the new age.

The ancient tradition of decorating the interiors of bathhouses with paintings was continued in the ninth and tenth centuries: in the view of the medical men and philosophers of the day (al-Râzî, Ibn Sînâ), these surroundings exerted a beneficial influence on the bathers. According to Ibn Sînâ, a proper bath-house should contain ‘well-executed, beautiful pictures showing, for example, lovers, parks and gardens or horsemen and wild animals’. Ornamental paintings executed in water-resistant colours were discovered on the walls of ruined ninth-century bathhouses in Termez and Nasa. Bathhouses were also built during the Timurid period in Samarkand, Balkh, Shahr-i Sabz and other important towns in the empire. One such bathhouse containing thematic paint-ings was built in Samarkand by one of Timur’s descendants, the ruler and scientist Ulugh Beg (1394–1449) (see on him, Volume IV, Part One, Chapter 17).

Under the Ghaznavids, palaces too were decorated with sculptures and wall paintings, as attested by the already-mentioned monumental paintings and reliefs discovered at Lashkar-i Bazar. Full-length figures of warriors and guardsmen clad in multi-coloured robes and wielding clubs are depicted on the walls of what was clearly a vast throne room. Their poses are static and their Mongoloid features recall those of figures in painted scenes on the glazed Iranian ceramics of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The treatment is three-dimensional without the full modelling of figures and garments. No detailed events or actions are described in the paintings. However, this is not the only example at the time of an official ceremonial style of painting. According to the eleventh-century historian Abu’ l-Fazl Bayhaqî, Amir Mas’ûd, the son of Mahmûd of Ghazna (see Volume IV, Part One, Chapter 5), spent some time in Herat in his youth and had a palace built there containing a room for rest and relaxation. He had this room decorated from floor to ceiling with images of naked men and women in scenes from a well-known erotic book of the time, the Alfiyya shalfiyya, which resembled the Indian Kama Sutra. On hearing of this, his father sent a courier to see whether this was true, but Mas’ûd managed to have the paintings effaced in time.

The relief compositions at Lashkar-i Bazar represent a step towards a more ornamental style, although figurative compositions were still produced. The sources of the traditions developed in the Iranian twelfth- and thirteenth-century stucco carvings found in Rayy, Sava and elsewhere may be detected in the style of the paintings and reliefs at Lashkar-i Bazar. The craftsmen’s talents were displayed not only in architectural decoration but also in the scenes executed in the relief and in the figurative representations of birds and animals on ceramic and bronze vessels, vases, jars and incense-burners.

No thematic painting from the eleventh century has been found in Transoxania. Sculptural representations were clearly no longer used for interior decoration. However, fine examples of carved stucco work from the eleventh–twelfth century palace of the local rulers of Termez depicting mythical creatures – lions with human heads – in full relief testify to local artists’ hankering after the figurative subjects of earlier centuries. In general, the carved stucco work of the period offers a decorative, three-dimensional treatment of vegetal and geometric designs. Magnificent palaces and vast religious edifices were erected between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century, ushering in a new stage in the development of thematic mural painting. The Timurid capital Samarkand, to which the best craftsmen, artists and architects were brought, became the centre of this art form. One of the commonest forms of wall painting in Samarkand was thematic landscape, executed by outlining the design in ochre and applying gold leaf. Examples of this type of painting, influenced by Chinese traditions, may be found inside the mausoleum of Shîrîn Biki Aqa (fourteenth century) in the Shah-i Zinda complex in Samarkand. The murals in other, later mausoleums in Samarkand, those of Bibi Khânum and Tûmân Aqa (fifteenth century), also have traces of landscape painting, executed in dark blue over white ganch (plaster) combined with gold leaf. A variety of trees and plants, depicted in three-dimensional graphic style, express in metaphorical terms ideas about paradise and heavenly blessings which were current at the time. Trees are frequently presented in separate cartouches or rosettes which themselves form part of the geometric ornament (Fig. 11). Hence the term ‘ornamental painting’ is more appropriate for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century monuments with elements of landscape painting such as the decoration with plant motifs inside the Gunbad-i Sayyidan in Shahr-i Sabz (see below, Chapter 18).

The influence of Chinese iconography is perceptible in the dragons depicted on the portal of the mosque at Anau (fifteenth century, near Ashgabat) in northern Khurasan and the graceful flying birds on the portal of the Dîwân-Begi madrasa in Bukhara (sixteenth century), but the general style of heraldic compositions with paired images reflects the trend towards refined ornamental art typical of the Timurid period. This tradition of zoomorphic imagery on the portals of mosques and madrasas was to be developed in the later architecture of the period.

Some schematic, rather primitively drawn images of various birds and animals, reminiscent in stylistic terms of the illustrations of scientific and pharmacological treatises, have been identified in the painting from slightly after our period at the mosque of Khoja Zayn al-Dîn (sixteenth century) and the madrasa of Mîr-i ‘Arab (sixteenth century) in Bukhara. However, the traditions of sculptural, three-dimensional art do not seem to have been reflected in the architectural monuments of the Timurid age.