Introduction
Unlike the great masters of the Florentine Renaissance, the miniaturists do not seek to simulate light in the image. There are no shadows or shades. Light is used not to reveal the material appearances, but instead to dissolve all matter in a way that purifies and metamorphoses it. Natural light is borrowed and captured in the folio with the help of gold and silver paints. Gold is scattered all around the scenes, from the divine light of the sky to princely cloths. The metallic sheen of gold surfaces fuses with the rich colors of the miniatures to depict a luminous and evanescent reflection of the world. The pictorial paste made of mineral pigments, and even the folio itself, seem without weight and thickness, as if made of pure light.
How did the miniaturists use light?
These techniques express a belief that considers the world of light superior to the world of matter. According to Mani, the ideal and the original miniaturist, the universe is born from the struggle between the evil world of matter and the good world of light. The goal of the artist was to liberate those parcels of light that are imprisoned in matter. The miniature was his attempt to reveal the divine meanings hidden behind the images of the tangible world. The artist sought to go beyond the limitations of human intelligence and biological senses. In a similar way to the Sufi states of trance and dreaming, the artist relied on his imagination to short-circuit his rational interpretations.
Why did they develop such techniques?
The miniaturists depicted the supernatural colors of a luminous world without depth, shadow or weight. The colors are vibrant and flat without any gradation. They belong neither to our sensorial world nor to the modern ideal of optical realism. They belong to the “world of imagination” which, for the Sufis, was a bridge between the sensorial and divine worlds. The artist superposed his imagination over the optical image of the world to reveal the augmented colors of metamorphosed landscapes. Born from the artist’s desire to grasp the Edenic vibration on Earth, these colors were considered magical and talismanic. Through almost an alchemical transmutation, the miniaturist transformed the world into a lucid dream, and pigments into pure colors of light.
How did the miniaturists use colours?
The miniaturists had a dream and our digital technology made that dream somewhat real. Their longing for an intangible world governed by light seems to have come true in the virtual space. Since the digital revolution, ungraspable pixels have been replacing earthly pigments. We are transitioning from matter-colors to light-colors. The electronic light of our digital screens has replaced the divine light that was represented by the gold skies of the miniatures. The miniatures depicted an augmented reality, somewhere between the tangible world of matter and the intangible world of light. In a similar fashion, today we live in an augmented reality in which physical and virtual worlds coexist. The intangible is no longer just a spiritual intuition, but an omnipresent digital construction. The magical complexity is no longer in the divine design of Nature, but in our cultural environment designed and governed by Artificial Intelligence.
How does the miniatures relate to our visual culture in the Digital Age?
Following the rise of light-colors, a group of architects seeks to express the ephemeral dimension of the virtual world of light. Using thin sheets of reflective and translucent materials, they conceive a “luminous architecture” that offers an otherworldly experience of space. Resisting the digital transition, another group of architects is designing earthly and sensorial experiences. As colors are liberated from the monopoly of matter, architecture frees itself from the geometric obsessions that developed since the Florentine Renaissance. Space is no longer just the sum of its measures. Our good old Euclidian space is out of fashion. The omnipresent digital screens disrupt the modern idea of a regular homogenous space. It defines our fluctuating, heterogeneous and irregular perception of space. Both in the miniatures and contemporary architecture, we see designs with blurred limits, flattened hierarchies, ambiguous positions and multiple viewpoints. However, there is a fundamental difference between these two seemingly similar visions. The places in the miniatures represented the dreams of mankind and his self-exploration, whereas the places of the digital age represent the calculations of the machine and mankind’s auto-submission.
How does light-colours influence architecture?
Containing the elixir of immortality, it shows to whoever looks in it
the destiny of all there is in the universe.
Alexander the Great and Suleyman the Magnificent have drunken from it.
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