This dissertation examines both text and illustration in luxury Persian literary manuscripts made in the late fifteenth through the first half of the sixteenth centuries. It analyzes a trend in painting that dominated artistic production during the early Safavid period but was initiated in the last decades of Timurid rule, when, in addition to conveying the actors and actions of a given passage, the illustrations also begin to include figure-types that have little or no connection to the narrative subject of the text. Such extra-textual depictions undermine the cohesiveness of the composition and have never been satisfactorily explained. Bracketing the causes or the implications of these phenomena, the study reconstructs a system of meaning within a complex of iconographic symbols as a basis for decoding such images.

It is posited that such enigmatic figures appear only in illustrations of allegorical Sufi narratives. The figures form a normative relation between the literal meaning of a story serving as the vehicle, and what is understood conventionally as the tenor, or metaphorical referent of that story, which is a discourse anterior to it. The process of reading an allegory is one of decoding the vehicle through an anterior text that is itself a secondary encoding of spiritual meaning that likewise needs decoding. The same process is also essential for any "reading" of the images illustrating such texts. The dissertation argues that, although as accompaniments to texts Persian manuscript paintings never cease pictorially to represent a given moment in the chronicled events of a given narrative—based on its "literal" meaning—in the late fifteenth century there is a burgeoning iconographic repertoire of human and animal figures and the objects with which they may be engaged, which serves as pictorial symbolism ostentatiously re-presenting a reading of the tenor contained by the (allegorical) narrative. The study will show such figure-types to be anagogies of the text even as they themselves remain metaphorical. Pictorially, such figures are analogous to the figurative language of the text. Thus, the text and the image are linked through disparate codes and signifiers whose signifieds are contained by the same anterior discourse.