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A long-standing puzzle in our knowledge of the culture surrounding the Shahnama lies in the fact that its illustrations, which became so well known, postdate the appearance of the text by nearly 300 years. There are several ways of explaining this anomaly. All contribute something to our understanding of Iranian culture, but none is entirely satisfactory. This essay suggests that a solution may lie in a better understanding of the social and ideological consequences of Mongol rule and/or in the peculiarities of urban culture at the time.

It is with some reluctance that I agreed to contribute a few remarks to conclude a learned and fruitful colloquium and to react, once again, to a wonderful exhibition on Qajar art. My reluctance is simple to explain and to justify. Such professional competencies as I have are those of a medievalist who begins to feel slightly uneasy by the middle of the fourteenth century. But, then, as a historian of the visual arts and as an individual curious about the lessons to be drawn from the making and uses of works of art everywhere and at any time, I became fascinated by the exhibition and many questions came to mind which may not be of immediate significance for the history and culture of Iran, but which have a lot to do with the arts in general.For these reasons, I shall not comment directly on the papers published in this volume, which are, for the most part, beyond my competencies, except to make two observations.

It is Very Difficult, in Fact Impossible, to Review Properly What is in fact an incomplete work, one in which many years separate the writing and publication of the first entries from the last ones and in which so much remains to be done. My purpose, in the remarks which follow, is to identify the main policy decisions that seem to have been made in presenting the architecture of the Iranian world, to comment at some length about the success or failure of entries dealing with various categories of presentation, and, all along, to make suggestions about ways of improving access to the information that has been provided. In most cases I did not identify the names of authors, because all of them made choices as to how to interpret their assignments, and the discussion of such choices is not useful in a review at this stage. Competence in the knowledge of their field is clear for all writers, and there are only a few cases of scholars who had not kept up with information or interpretation and whose articles are lacking in substance.