Kamal ud-Din Behzad

Kamal ud-Din Behzad was born about 1455 (sources give dates between 1450 and 1460) in Herat, the capital of Timurid Khorasan. Almost nothing is known of his family: according to Qazi Ahmad, he was orphaned young and was brought up and trained as a painter by the court artist and calligrapher Mirak Naqqash (Amir Ruhullah). Some sources also name Pir Sayyid Ahmad Tabrizi among his teachers. Behzad had at least two siblings, whose descendants later became his pupils.

According to the Herat historian Khwandamir, Behzad worked first for Alisher Navoi and then for Sultan Husayn Bayqara, in both cases in the workshop run by Mirak Naqqash. In his “Khulasat al-akhbar”, written in 1499–1500, Khwandamir already praises him among the skilled painters of the court. Later Behzad headed the sultan’s kitabkhana, the court workshop where manuscripts were copied and decorated; sources date his appointment differently, from 1486 to the 1490s. Babur, who knew his work, called it very delicate but remarked that he painted beardless faces less well than bearded ones.

The only manuscript whose signatures of Behzad are accepted as genuine is a “Bustan” of Sa’di copied for Husayn Bayqara’s library by the calligrapher Sultan Ali Mashhadi in 1488 (now in the National Library of Egypt in Cairo). In its double-page frontispiece and four miniatures the painter worked his name into inscriptions on buildings or placed it discreetly on an object; two of the paintings are dated 1488–89. Among them is the famous scene of Yusuf fleeing Zulaikha, in which the locked rooms of a palace carry the tension of the story. On grounds of style, paintings in a number of other Herat manuscripts are attributed to him or his immediate circle — Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi’s “Zafarnama”, Attar’s “Mantiq al-tayr”, and the “Khamsa” of Navoi and of Nizami.

Husayn Bayqara died in 1506, and in 1507 Herat was taken by Muhammad Shaybani Khan. Babur writes that Shaybani Khan took up the pen himself to “correct” the work of Behzad and of the calligrapher Sultan Ali Mashhadi. A portrait of Shaybani Khan attributed to Behzad is dated to these years; some scholars believe the painter lived in Bukhara in 1507–1510, but this is unproven. In 1510 Shaybani Khan was killed fighting the Safavid Shah Ismail I, and Herat passed to the Safavids.

When and how Behzad moved to Tabriz is unknown. A decree in the name of Shah Ismail dated 1522 puts him in charge of the calligraphers, painters, gilders and other craftsmen of the royal library, though some scholars doubt the document’s authenticity. Safavid authors describe Behzad as a painter of Shah Tahmasp I (r. 1524–1576); according to Qazi Ahmad, when he arrived in Tabriz the shah’s kitabkhana was already running under Sultan Muhammad. He moved there with his family: his nephew, the calligrapher Rustam Ali, and his grandnephews, the painters Muhibb Ali and Muzaffar Ali, trained in Tabriz.

Behzad died in 1535 or 1536. According to Dust Muhammad, he remained in Shah Tahmasp’s service until his death and was buried in Tabriz beside the grave of the poet Kamal Khujandi; Qazi Ahmad, however, places his tomb in Herat, on the hill of Koh-i Mukhtar.

Behzad’s miniatures are marked by carefully balanced compositions, a clear construction of space and lively, individual figures, and he liked to include scenes of everyday life — builders at work, bath attendants, camel drivers. Already under the Safavids his name became a byword for mastery, and his compositions served as models for painters in Bukhara, Tabriz and Mughal India. In Uzbekistan the National Institute of Arts and Design and a memorial garden museum in Tashkent bear his name.