Baysunghur Shahnameh (Herat)

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

The Baysunghur Shahnameh, commissioned by Prince Baysunghur of the Timurid dynasty in Herat, represents one of the highest peaks of Persian manuscript art. Through the lens of Michel Foucault’s philosophy, particularly his late work The History of Sexuality Volume 3: The Care of the Self, this monumental text-artwork emerges as a technology of subjectivation—a stylized mechanism through which the princely self is cultivated, shaped, and inscribed with ideals of Persianate kingship, ethical order, and aesthetic governance.

Foucault’s notion of epimeleia heautou—care of the self—is a guiding metaphor here. The Shahnameh was not merely a cultural object or a historical record; it functioned as a “mirror for princes,” transmitting an ethical regime of self-fashioning. Baysunghur, as a patron-prince, internalized not only the genealogies and legends of his cultural predecessors but actively shaped his own self-image through this text. The art of manuscript production becomes, in Foucauldian terms, an aesthetic of existence—a visual and textual labor of self-care, where both the manuscript and the princely self are ornamented through acts of cultivation, regulation, and refinement.

The manuscript also exemplifies what Foucault identifies as the interplay of discourse and visibility. Its opulent miniatures do not merely illustrate the stories—they create regimes of visuality. Scenes of battle, enthronement, cosmic order, and divine intervention function as pictorial dispositifs, orchestrating how knowledge is distributed, how power is symbolized, and how the viewer’s gaze is trained. The use of space, color, and figural arrangement reflects a highly codified visual grammar in service of ethical and political tutelage.

Moreover, within the manuscript, the idea of paideia—or educative formation of the soul—is translated into Persian terms through the mythopoetic structure of Ferdowsi’s epic. Characters such as Rostam or Kay Khosrow become ethical figures through whom the manuscript models the balance between heroic agency and cosmic order. The illustrated folios thus perform what Foucault might call a pedagogical choreography: to look upon the Shahnameh is to be initiated into modes of governance over one’s self and one’s realm.