A perspective illusion or a view from the clouds? Detail of an Early 16th-Century miniature painting produced in Tabriz (Iran)

A Persian painting (910H/1505) from a manuscript of Nizami’s Khamsa preserved in the Keir Collection portrays the mi'raj of Muḥammad among many angels in a blue sky; the Ka'ba is depicted in the lower foreground while the desert surrounds almost the entire image. In the upper part of the sky ten half-bust angels look out from an oculus among the clouds. This image clearly recalls coeval European painting, and in particular the oculus painted by Andrea Mantegna on the vault of the Camera Picta or “Camera degli Sposi” in the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua. Nevertheless, the unusual and contextual introduction of a parallel and inverse perspective enables the oculus of the Keir Collection miniature to take on an appearance and consequent meaning different from the Western ones.