While European painting turned to large walls and canvases, in the Islamic world of Iran and Central Asia the highest visual art was the miniature, fitted to the pages of hand-written books. At this small scale an extraordinary refinement developed: brilliant mineral colours, gold leaf, patterns and figures drawn with a hair-fine brush. The greatest master of the tradition is Kamal ud-Din Bihzad (c. 1450–1535), who worked at the Timurid capital of Herat at the end of the fifteenth century.

His 1488 miniature "The Seduction of Yusuf" (Yusuf and Zulaikha), made for a copy of the poet Sa'di's "Bustan," is the most famous example of his mastery. The scene is the moment when Zulaikha draws Yusuf into the innermost room of a seven-chambered palace and makes advances, while Yusuf flees. Bihzad tells this psychological tension through a striking architectural construction: doors opening onto doors, right-angled stairways, walls covered in ornamented panels, a multi-storey structure climbing up the page. The perspective is not single-vanishing-point like the West's; space is a play of planes that takes the viewer in and shows many surfaces at once.

Bihzad's innovation was to give the figures real movement and individuality, and the composition a balanced complexity. Empty areas and filled zones, warm and cool colours, are distributed with a flawless weighing. Calligraphy and painting meet on the same page, within the same aesthetic discipline.

Bihzad's influence lasted for centuries; he is the common ancestor of the miniature traditions of Safavid Iran, Mughal India, and the Ottomans. Often neglected by Western art history, this tradition is a summit in its own right in constructing figure within space and carrying colour and pattern to a mathematical harmony — and at the head of the road leading to Levni in the Ottoman court stands Bihzad.