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Aqa Mirak [Sayyid Aqa Jalal al-Din Mirak al-Hasani (or al-Husayni) al-Isfahani]
( fl Tabriz, c. 1520–55; Mashhad, c. 1555–65; Qazvin, 1565–?75; d before 1576). Persian illustrator and painter. He was painter, purveyor and boon companion to the Safavid shah Tahmasp I and was well known in contemporary circles. The contemporary chronicler Dust Muhammad mentioned that Aqa Mirak along with MIR MUSAVVIR did wall paintings for Prince Sam Mirza’s palace in Tabriz and illustrations for royal manuscripts of Firdawsi’s Shahnama (‘Book of kings’) and Nizami’s Khamsa (‘Five poems’). Qazi Ahmad wrote that he had no peer in artistic design and was an incomparable painter, very clever, enamoured of his art, a bon vivant, an intimate [of the Shah] and a sage. A manuscript (London, BL, Or. MS. 2265) of the Khamsa done between 1539 and 1543 has four illustrations bearing attributions to Aqa Mirak. Dickson and Welch have attributed other paintings to Aqa Mirak in the monumental copy (dispersed; ex-Houghton priv. col.) of the Shahnama made for Tahmasp, and have used these attributions to define four periods in the artist’s life. Works ascribed to a youthful period in the 1520s have tautly composed landscapes inhabited by a few large-scale figures. A transitional period in the early 1530s was followed by mature works produced from the late 1530s to c. 1555, in which the compositions are more complex and the colouring more subtle. In the view of Dickson and Welch, at the end of his life the artist returned to his youthful style in two paintings (fols 169v and 291r) for Ibrahim Mirza’s copy (Washington, DC, Freer, 46.12) of Jami’s Haft awrang (‘Seven thrones’) produced between 1556 and 1565.
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