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Your galleryViper in a Rocky Garden
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Follow the viper’s speckled coils from the tip of its tail up to its open jaws, then find the red spots scattered in front of them.
This page comes from a copy of the Manafi’ al-Hayawan, On the Usefulness of Animals, a book by Ibn Bakhtishu’, who died in 1058. The Art Institute of Chicago dates the page about 1300 and records it as made in Iran. Text runs above, beside and below the picture of a speckled viper coiled before a blue-green rock under a flowering tree. In 2019 the page was lent to the J. Paul Getty Museum for Book of Beasts, an exhibition on the medieval bestiary.
Opaque watercolor and ink on paper · 24.3 × 18.9 cm · Art Institute of Chicago
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Details and source
- Museum title
- Viper in a Rocky Garden from Manafi' al-Hayawan (On the Usefulness of Animals) of Ibn Bakhtishu'
- Artist
- Iran
- Date
- c. 1300
- Medium
- Opaque watercolor and ink on paper
- Dimensions
- 24.3 × 18.9 cm (9 9/16 × 7 7/16 in.)
- Credit line
- Lucy Maud Buckingham Collection
- Image license
- CC0 1.0 · Public domain
- Museum record
- Art Institute of Chicago
Galler’s rooms and hanging scale are imagined. The image is the museum’s original digital reproduction.