Persian miniature painting is the manuscript art of the Persianate world, small scale, densely detailed and jewel coloured illustration produced within kitabkhanas, the court workshops that also housed calligraphers, bookbinders and illuminators, primarily to accompany and illustrate manuscript texts, above all the great classical Persian poetic epics, Ferdowsi's Shahnameh chief among them, alongside historical chronicles and, in smaller measure though still significantly, religious and devotional narrative material.
Major schools developed under successive dynastic patronage across the medieval and early modern Persianate world, the Timurid, Safavid and Mughal courts each fostering distinctive stylistic developments and producing celebrated named masters, Kamal ud Din Behzad foremost among the Timurid and early Safavid painters, whose work later generations of Persian and Mughal painters treated as a technical and compositional benchmark for centuries afterward. Its religious dimension must be stated honestly and with real qualification: Persian miniature painting sits closer to court and literary art than to devotional or liturgical practice in the way icon painting or thangka painting function, and much of its subject matter is historical, romantic or heroic narrative rather than explicitly religious content, even where Islamic and, in Mughal contexts, Hindu religious narrative and Sufi poetic themes recur within the wider corpus.