Rakhsh · Chapter 5 of 5
What the Painters Did With Him
Six centuries of painting · A dappled coat · An inherited convention
Ferdowsi gave him a few lines. The painters gave him a face.
The horse has a second life the poem did not give him. Persian manuscript painting treated the Shahnameh as its central subject for six centuries, and Rakhsh is one of the things a painter was judged on: the dappled coat, the stance over the lion, the twist of the body around the dragon. In the great illustrated copies — the Mongol-period manuscript of the 1330s, the Shah Tahmasp copy of the sixteenth century — his colouring works as a signature. A description of a few lines in verse turned into a set of visual conventions that workshops inherited from one another.
- A dappled coat
- A painter's test
- Six centuries
Unlocks in-game at Ascension tier 4.
