The Date and Provenance of the Automata Miniatures

Abstract

IT was about 1910 that a series of very important Oriental miniature paintings appeared on the market. These miniatures, of broadly effective archaic style, obviously representing mechanical devices, became known as the “automata miniatures.”¹ They figured prominently in the exhibition of Islamic art at Munich in 1910 and a little later in the exhibition of miniatures at Paris in 1912. The date of their execution became the subject of a rather heated controversy. Some writers attributed the paintings to the end of the twelfth century A. D.; while Blochet, Schulz, and Creswell assigned them to the middle of the fourteenth century, regarding them as of Egyptian provenance. More recently Coomaraswamy has succeeded in proving that the “automata miniatures” come from a copy of a treatise of al-Jazari on ingenious mechanical contrivances; he thought the treatise possibly dated from the thirteenth century.² A later manuscript of this treatise at Oxford, dated 1496 A. D., but supposed to be copied from a manuscript of 1341, has been translated by Wiedemann and Hauser.³