Horse colours and markings in Timurid painting

Timurid manuscripts show horses in many colours and markings. Ghada Abd al-Salam Naji Fayed reads this variety as a reflection of real horses in the places where the pictures were made, and uses it to place painting centres in Samarkand, Herat and Shiraz ¹.

Horses were the main means of movement in peace and war. Horsemanship marked rulers and commanders, and was practised as sport, pleasure, hunting and a source of livelihood ¹. Because painters were shaped by their surroundings, the horses in the pictures carry the mark of the horses they saw ¹.

The author divides the colours into four groups: white (al-ashhab), which comes first ²; red, including al-kumayt and al-ashqar ³; yellow ⁴; and black, including al-adham ⁴. See al-ashhab, al-kumayt, al-asfar and al-adham.

A marking (al-shiya) is any colour that differs from the horse's main colour; a horse with none is called bahim musmat ⁵. The author argues that horses in Samarkand and Herat were imported from Khutlan and carried markings, so blazes and white legs appear in the pictures of those cities ⁵. See marking, blaze and white on the legs.

The author argues that Shiraz horses were plain, without markings, and that a hunting scene in a manuscript of 801 AH does not belong to the Shiraz school because its horses have blazes ⁶. This is her view on attribution and may be contested by other scholars.

The author ties the variety of markings in Bihzad's paintings to his access to a book on horses, the Farsnama, which belonged to Shah Quli, head of the stables of Sultan Husayn Mirza Bayqara ⁷. She draws this from the historical sources; it has not been checked here.

The author notes that many of the coloured reproductions in her study come from museum websites, and that she cannot be sure they have not been published before ². The readings on this page are the author's, not final judgements.

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