ABSTRACT
This chapter has as its principal purpose the resolution of one of the contradictions most characteristic of the small extant body of scholarship concerned with BR. This, in turn, in the second section, will permit an extended discussion of the function and purpose of the image program in light of the text’s content, which will be argued to be the factor that most directly influenced the images’ production. Since the manuscript was discovered in 1940, art historians have seen in its illustrations connections both to visual production in BR’s most immediate geographical and chronological context, and to visual production further east, proceeding from the so-called “Central Islamic lands.” Particular attention has been paid to the possibility of direct influence upon the AndalusƯ images’ patrons and makers from the image programs of a small number of illustrated copies of MaqƗmƗt, most of which are agreed to have been produced in the cultural centers of Baghdad and Northern Mesopotamia (possibly in Mosul) during the thirteenth century.1 While acknowledging the validity of the relationship of the BR images to elements of visual culture produced closer to the perceived centers of the “Islamic world,” I will take issue with the idea that specific illustrated copies of the MaqƗmƗt or of any other eastern text provided models for the AndalusƯ image program. I will instead suggest an alternate path through which these “Eastern” concepts of image-making might have reached alAndalus, one which will allow us to acknowledge and explain the importance of contacts with the eastern part of the dƗr al-IslƗm to the manuscript’s conception and production, while at the same time permitting us to satisfactorily describe and explore the uniqueness of the BR illustration program vis-à-vis the images which have long been assumed to have been its model.
