Hostage Iranian Miniatures

STUART CARY WELCH joined his grammar school class on a field trip to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts when he was 11. At the museum, the students dutifully marched through an exhibition of Indian and Persian paintings. Welch's classmates, one supposes, paid attention to the paintings for as long as they had to. But Welch really liked what he saw. He liked it so much, in fact, that seven years later, after he finished his schooling at St. Paul's, Welch came back to Boston to study fine arts at Harvard.

A graduate of the class of '50, the second of three generations of Harvard Fine Arts concentrators, Welch took a liking to American Indian painting. As a graduate student, he studied classical art. Over the years, he developed a taste for exoticae. Today, about thirty years later, the University officially recognizes Welch as the "Curator of Muslim and Hindu Painting in the William Hayes Fogg Art Museum, the Honorary Curator of Indian and Islamic Manuscripts in the Harvard College Library, and a Senior Lecturer on Fine Arts."

It would be too easy to call Stuart Cary Welch an eccentric. In his office on the very top floor of the Fogg art museum, secluded among his collection of documents about Persian, Indian and Mughal painting, Welch thinks and writes about things that most people don't think and write about. He carries a battered Vuiton briefcase and wears J. Press shirts spackled with paint, spotted with holes, striped with tradition. He has a tendency, as one of his friends says, to "show up in sweaters that have been worn day in and day out." He is independently wealthy; there is no need for him to work at the Fogg. In one of his New Hampshire houses, Stuart Cary Welch collects stoves.

But Welch is also one of three or four people in the world who know anything about Persian paintings of the 16th century. About four years ago, he decided that it would be nice to bring together the works of that little known period. From his desk in the Fogg, Welch composed a letter to the director of the British Library reference division, the caretaker of one of the two great works of the early Safavid period, asking for his cooperation. "I thought they would scream with pain and say 'What do you mean?' " Welch says.

But Welch was dead wrong. The people at the British Museum liked his idea, as did a number of private donors and museums. Aided by a small yet fanatical team of academics and collectors, Welch traced the whereabouts of the early Safavid paintings, aiming to assemble the greatest collection of 16th century Iranian painting brought together since--surprise--the 16th century. Five years later, that exhibition has already made its way through the British Library in London and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Dubbed "Wonders of the Age" (from a manuscript of the period), the collection now occupies Gallery XII of the Fogg Art Museum.

Based upon two of the great works of the age--the Shahnama (Book of Kings) and the Quintet of Nizami--"Wonders of the Age," in its rawest form is a collection of illustrations that accompanied 16th century Iranian epic poems. Although the paintings--the majority of which are drawn from the two books--dazzle at 50 paces, they don't quite have the flash of recent popular exhibitions. The Persian miniatures lack the lustrous, overpowering gold of Tut, the intricate bejeweled splash of the Sythian gold, or the chic of just-released objects of Chinese archeology. If anything, the exhibit's origin--Iran--work against its success. But "Wonders of the Age," like its proprietor, is not your average exhibit.

THE PAINTINGS--some of which contain more than 50 two-inch figures--literally ravish the eye. They are brilliant in their color, striking in their design and almost unreal in their detail. The court-commissioned artists, the catalogue tells us, fashioned their brushes from squirrel and kitten hairs. They worked for days on a single figure. The paintings are illuminated book plates; even on such a scale, they are subtler than works 30 times their size. Among the rocks and the sky hide contorted faces, tiny animals and endless innuendo. Welch, who's done work in the field for more than 20 years, says that he still finds figures in paintings that he's looked at since he began.

But more than art, the Safavid collection tells a story. It is a story of court intrigue and suspicion, of endless gore ("in a delightful way" says Welch), of fights against beasties (half-lions and half-apes) and hunting campaigns in the Iranian countryside. Beneath all of this lies a complicated story, one that Welch and his partner--Martin Bernard Dickson of Princeton--have deciphered after years of work. "People used to say it was impossible to say who painted what," Welch says, but all that has changed. "I looked harder and longer at paintings than most people do," he explains and rattles off the names of various artists. But don't bother to try and get beneath the stacks of Iranian names and subplots; read the descriptions below and take in the paintings for what they are.

THE SILVER in these paintings has tarnished black and the books themselves are fraying at the edges. The paintings--preserved for years inside these albums and now displayed behind two layers of glass--are not going to disappear. But after May 18, this exhibit isn't going to happen again. Stuart Cary Welch kind of sniffles when he talks about this, but then he smiles and hands you one of the "Wonders of the Age" buttons he has made. It's not everyday that you can see paintings that, as Welch says, "make the French impressionists look like wallpaper."