Day of Judgment, folio from a manuscript of the Falnama (Book of Omens)

This folio belongs to a now-dispersed pictorial falnama (book of omens), probably created for Shah Tahmasp. To use a pictorial falnama, the seeker opened the codex randomly to a double-page spread that featured an image on one page and a self-contained text on the other. Interpreted together in light of the query, the image and text communicated the prediction. Keenly interested in divinatory practices, Tahmasp is known to have engaged in prognostication for the women of his court. The painting illustrates the day of judgment. The inscriptions in a later hand help explicate this painting’s complex iconography. The three winged figures are archangels: one holds trumpets to announce the Day of Judgment; one holds scales to weigh good deeds against bad; and another contemplates the damned, who suffer punishments specific to their sins. Interceding for the dead are the Prophet Muhammad, kneeling beneath a green banner, and his son-in-law and successor, the Imam ʿ Ali standing across. The text side of the folio, in large-scale nasta'liq, cites the Garden of Eden, and announces that "the rose of your desires has bloomed in the garden of good fortune." It once faced an illustration of happy souls in Paradise.