SHEILA CANBY: In this case you’ll notice a contrast of painting styles. After the fall of the Mongols in about 1340… there was a great dissolution in Iran, and many courts sprang up in different centers. Then at the end of the century, Timur, or Tamerlane, conquered Central Asia and Iran and many other places, too. But from the point of view of the history of painting, this conquest was very important because he… sent his sons and his grandsons out to be governors in different cities around Iran. So the southern city of Shiraz became very important. And what we find is in the period of Ibrahim Sultan in Shiraz that we get a very simplified kind of painting where it's very direct, and the artists simply were trying to portray historical events in the most direct, clear way. Meanwhile, after the death of… Timur, not every place in Iran remained equally under… the strict control of the Timurids. And so we find in areas like Tabriz, which is northwest, the Turkmens are gaining enough wealth as well as power to be patrons of the arts. …They never could afford until the end of the 15th century to hire the very best artists, and so we get a kind of charming but simplified style of painting, practiced for the Turkmans.