List of Illustrations; Acknowledgments; Introduction: Coming to Terms with Meaning in Persian Painting; 1. Poetics of the Picture: Verbal Imagery and Visual Language ; 2. Remaking Persian Painting: Didactic Sufism in a Timurid Manuscript; 3. The Third Station on the Path to Sufism: The Bearded Man Drowning; 4. Fixed-Figure Prototypes and the Symbolic Order; 5. The Culmination of a Trend: “Depraved Man Commits Bestiality”; Conclusion: The Sufi Synthesis; Notes; Illustrations; Bibliography.