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Podcast: New Books in Art
Episode: Robert Hillenbrand, "The Great Mongol Shahnameh" (Hali Publications et al., 2022)
Description: It’s amazing that art historians like Robert Hillenbrand got to study the “Great Mongol Shahnama” at all.500 pages of Firahdosi’s epic poem, with 300 illustrations, in a manuscript whose leaves are as wide as an ordinary person’s arms. Never completed, never bound, smuggled out of Iran by corrupt dignitaries, and separated and padded out by an unsavory Belgian art dealer.Robert Hillenbrand’s work collects all these disparate illustrations and puts them together in one book, which puts “The Great Mongol Shahnama” back at the center of a sprawling 14th-century Mongol empire.Robert Hillenb...