Shahnameh of Ferdowsi (Houghton Shahnameh, Iran)

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

The Shahnameh, Ferdowsi’s “Book of Kings,” is not merely a literary chronicle of Persian myth and national history; in the illuminated Houghton manuscript tradition, it becomes a sovereign art-object—a grand mirror where a culture enacts a centuries-long care of its civilizational soul. Through the Foucauldian lens, particularly informed by The History of Sexuality Vol. 3: The Care of the Self, this manuscript is an exercise in aesthetic subjectivation—but not of a single self. Rather, it is the subjectivization of an entire polity, through the recollection, revision, and reinvention of its heroic memory.

Each miniature is not a simple pictorial decoration, but an ontological act. Kings, demons, and sages are rendered with delicate detail and celestial pigments; each folio stages a tableau where cosmic conflict is not simply represented—it is re-enacted, where the regime of truth about power, legitimacy, virtue, and order is continually reinscribed. Foucault, especially in The Order of Things, might read these illustrations as a system of epistemic classification, visualizing a cosmos where lineage, heroism, and kingship are metaphysical constants—not just cultural constructs.

But the manuscript also embodies the care of the self on another register: it proposes, through Ferdowsi’s poetic ethos and through painterly discipline, an ethical style of governance and masculinity. Heroic figures such as Rostam are not raw expressions of force, but model what Foucault would call a “moderated freedom”—agents who rule not through domination, but through the aesthetic organization of their passions, loyalties, and fates. Their tragedies often result from failures to listen, to restrain, to reflect.

Within the Foucauldian framework, then, the Shahnameh manuscript is a technology of remembering, a book that instructs not through didactic rule, but through the dramatized stories of those who lacked the care of the self—or those who exemplified it too well, and thus stood apart from history.

The manuscript’s illumination program—the spatial organization of images, margins, and calligraphy—reflects an episteme of beauty as lawfulness, where ethical and aesthetic orders are inseparable. It does not merely depict power; it disciplines the reader/viewer into a form of heroic contemplation.