Rumi's Father Gives a Sermon in the Qaniʿi Cemetery of Konya

What it is

This is a dense, colourful Persian-style miniature painting. It shows a crowd of turbaned men in red, green, blue and gold robes gathered around a seated bearded figure on a raised platform, with patterned tiled walls and architecture around them. Figures in the lower foreground sit on the ground. The painter is not named in the facts, and the work is dated 1590, long after Rumi's death in 1273.

Why it matters

The painting shows how later artists remembered Rumi's family. It depicts his father, Baha' al-Din Walad, a preacher in Konya, drawn from a story that the family later told. Because it was made more than three centuries after the events, it tells us about the Ottoman-era imagination of Konya as much as about the thirteenth century.

Look closer

• Who looks most important in the painting, and how does the artist show that?
• What clues in the clothing and architecture suggest the time and place the painter had in mind?
• What might a painter who lived 300 years later have changed or invented from the original story?