FINBARR B. FLOOD Animal, Vegetal, and Mineral: Ambiguity and Efficacy in the Nishapur Wall Paintings

A series of enigmatic ninthor tenth-century wall paintings from Nishapur in eastern Iran seems to have been imbued with amuletic, apotropaic, or talismanic properties. Recapitulating while exaggerating some of the properties of marble, the paintings also include anthropomorphic and vegetal imagery. Their idiosyncratic iconography seems to highlight a tension between physis and technē that may be relevant to the ambiguous ontology of efficacious images in general. Representations 133. Winter 2016 © The Regents of the University of California. ISSN 0734-6018, electronic ISSN 1533855X, pages 20–58. All rights reserved. Direct requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php? p1⁄4reprints. DOI: 10.1525/rep.2016.133.2.20. 20 paintings compels one to fall back on analogical reasoning, which suggests that the paintings were invested with apotropaic or talismanic properties directly relevant to their strange appearance. Given the lack of any related contextual data, any attempt to analyze the paintings with respect to their proposed apotropaic imagery must necessarily be speculative. Nevertheless, even such a tentative approach to the paintings may be useful in highlighting aspects of the relation between materiality and representation relevant to the efficacious functioning of apotropaiac and talismanic imagery in general. In particular, the unusual conjunction of anthropomorphic, lithic, and vegetal imagery in the Nishapur paintings raises interesting questions about efficacy, ontology, and the apotropaic image, questions underlined by the metaquality of the Nishapur images as painted abstractions of natural forms and media.