
Louis Massignon writes, "The art of Persian miniatures, without atmosphere, without perspective, without shadows and without modelling, in the metallic splendor if its polychromy, peculiar to itself, bears witness to the fact that its orginators were undertaking a kind of alchemic sublimation of the particles of divine light imprisoned in the 'mass' of the picture. Precious metals, gold and silver, come to the surface of the fringes and the crowns, of the offerings and cups, to escape from the matrix of the colors."
Corbin says, "Let us make no mistake as the meaning of these colors... when we find them again in the gold background of the Byzantine icons and mosaics... it remains always a question of the same transfiguring light..." - The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 137-8.
The illustration is from a manuscript in the Turkish Museum in Istanbul. It is an anthology of Persian poets published in Shiraz in 1398 C.E. and is reproduced in Corbin's Spiritual Body & Celestial Earth from Gray, Basil, Persian Painting, Geneva, Skira, 1956. (Here borrowed from Greg Roberts)