NEW YORK -- Midway through The Legacy of Genghis Khan at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there are a few tent hangings, woven silk and gold. Mongol rulers, we are instructed by the wall text, reconciled their nomadic roots with the perks of sedentary life by lugging giant tents on wheeled contraptions pulled by oxen.
These portable palaces were lined with fancy textiles, sewn together and draped, to make a kind of interior arcade. One tent was said to have been so elaborate it took three years to construct and furnish. Another, made of white velvet, was reported to have been big enough to fit more than 2,000 men in it.
Now that's camping.
The tent panels, although a little worn after 700 years or so, are spectacularly beautiful. They mix Chinese and Iranian sources: hybrid art that illustrates the effect of the Mongol unification of Asia, which is the point of this serious, important, tasteful show.
Seriousness and importance are admirable traits, of course. An exceptional period of Islamic art, previously little known, is handsomely laid out, but you may arrive at the Met expecting a little more razzle-dazzle from an exhibition about a bloodthirsty conqueror who started an empire that ultimately stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Hungary. The subject would seem ripe for the kind of theatrical exploitation that the Met does so well when it puts its mind to it.
Legacy of Hulagu
As it happens, Genghis Khan, who died in 1227, does not actually have much to do with this exhibition (through Feb. 16). He was too busy -- murdering, pillaging and plotting how to get out of Mongolia -- to promote the arts. The show is really about his heirs, including Kublai Khan, the founder of the Yuan dynasty in China, and Hulagu, who subdued Baghdad and established the rule of the Ilkhanids.
The interchange between China and Iran under Mongol rule is the show's leitmotif. Its subtitle is Courtly Art and Culture in Western Asia, 1256-1353, the Ilkhanid dynasty.
The Met stuck Genghis Khan's name on the show because Hulagu doesn't quite ring the same gong.
As a result, notwithstanding the subterfuge, this is one of those large, elegant and sedate historical exhibitions, partly archaeological, full of small, exquisite objects, which reward close examination. Experts will lament the absence of prized works, which, for one reason or another, couldn't be borrowed.
In some cases, the show must make do. It includes a few glazed tiles from which you are asked to extrapolate huge decorated buildings; it presents a couple of gold and silver medallions called paizas -- passports for imperial envoys in Mongol days (Marco Polo had a gold one) -- by which it is hoped you may conjure up a whole medieval world of caravans and diplomats on horseback crisscrossing continents. A vivid imagination helps.
Organized by Stefano Carboni of the Met and Linda Komaroff of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the exhibition seems modeled after a show of Timurid art that was in Washington and Los Angeles around a dozen years ago.
That landmark survey also mixed art and political history around the central figure of a dynastic founder. Timur wanted to be the next Genghis Khan. He conquered the Ottomans and swept through what is now central Asia, Iran, Iraq, Syria and northern India, hoping to capture China and reconstitute Genghis Khan's empire when he died in 1405. He and his successors used artisans and painters from Iran, Syria, Anatolia and India, establishing workshops to produce objects of mixed cultural roots whose beauty glorified the Timurids.
Mongol metalworkers created the gold saddle in the tent room, a traditional object of Mongol nomadic life turned into a glittery symbol of courtly power. Covering saddles with plates of gold was a Chinese idea. Saddles like this appear in Yuan paintings and Ilkhanid manuscript illuminations.
First complete history
The art of illuminated books especially thrived under the Ilkhanids, and much of the show is devoted to book illustrations. Ghazan, the seventh Ilkhanid ruler, commissioned Rashid al-Din, his vizier (a Jew converted to Islam), who ran an atelier of painters in Tabriz, to produce a history of the Mongols, the Compendium of Chronicles. This evolved into the first complete history of the known world: four volumes covering all of history from biblical times, including European, Chinese and Indian history.
The point was to legitimize Mongol rule over the continent.
The show ends with the best-known work of Mongol art, the Great Mongol Shahnama, previously called the Demotte Shahnama. Georges Demotte was the Paris dealer who, in the 1910s, cut up and sold off different parts of the book, making it impossible to reconstruct what the original looked like. The exhibition includes 21 of the book's 57 surviving illustrated pages.
Some pictures explode with movement. A painting of Alexander the Great battling the Indians is a swirl of fire, clouds and charging horses turned into a nearly abstract pattern of circles and arabesques. The colors are washy and rich. If you think of Persian painting as jewel-like and restrained, you are thinking of what came later.
Here the work is energetic and all over the place. Chinese, Mongol, Western and Iranian sources interweave. You even see the influence of Giotto and Italian art in an illustration of two figures embracing, one with his back turned, standing in a Chinese landscape of steep perspective.
But you don't need to know anything about art history or politics to appreciate this.
The exhibition is, in the end, a scholastically useful overview of Mongol art, which undercuts itself a bit through titular hype, although its ultimate value, as with all exhibitions of beautiful things, comes from hanging works like the Shahnama on the wall and just letting people look. History is instructive. Great art is sublime.