A Kerfuffle Over an Ancient Persian Miniature

An eager cub reporter slides into an art-world morass involving the Andarz Nama, a possibly fake book of princely advice

By Ian Strasfogel

June 2, 2025

The original clipping is yellow with age and flakes off at the slightest provocation, but it’s a godsend. It revives my memories of that bizarre episode when I went mano a mano with Philip Rhys Adams, the director of the Cincinnati Art Museum, and Arthur Upham Pope, then the world’s leading expert on ancient Persian art.

The year was 1960. A Harvard undergraduate, I’d just snared a choice summer job as a reporter and reviewer for the entertainment section of The Cincinnati Enquirer—in those days a well-respected journal with a readership of more than 100,000. E.B. Radcliffe, the newspaper’s entertainment editor, aware that I’d been churning out reviews for The Harvard Crimson and Opera News, had gamely invited me to join his staff for the summer.

One day, not long after I arrived, Rad (as everyone called him) asked me into his office, inquiring, “Ian, you know something about art history, don’t you?”

“Sure,” I replied, brimming with self-confidence.

And with that, Radcliffe alerted me, per a recent AP report, that “scholars think those Persian miniatures at the Cincinnati Art Museum are phony.”

I’d recently seen these works in their prominent display cases at the museum. The wall texts called them the world’s oldest known Persian miniatures, dating from the 11th century C.E., illustrating passages from the Andarz Nama—an ancient book of princely advice. The pages, which featured elegant calligraphy and overweight potentates in brocaded robes and puffy hats, had been discovered during the Second World War and introduced in 1950 to an amazed congress of scholars in Istanbul.

Afterwards, the Cincinnati Art Museum, led by the intrepid Philip Rhys Adams, purchased a large group of these miniatures—which was a very big deal for a medium-size American museum. No less an expert than Richard N. Frye, professor of Iranian studies at Harvard, announced that Cincinnati was acquiring part of “the most important discovery in recent years in the field of Iranian studies.”

A page from the contested Andarz Nama manuscript. Scholars point to stylistic inconsistencies in the calligraphy.
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Within ten years, things changed drastically. In the spring of 1960—before I started my job in Cincinnati—scholars at the Fourth International Congress of Iranian Art and Archaeology had noted numerous incongruities in both the calligraphy and artwork of these miniatures. They suspected a modern forgery. I salivated at the prospect of covering a major scandal.

“Now, don’t get too excited,” said Rad. “The whole thing might be a tempest in a teapot.” He promptly asked me to call Phil Adams over at the museum to see what he thought.

Within minutes I was on the line with Adams, who (unsurprisingly) dismissed the scholarly objections as trifling and pedantic.

“All that fussing over which type of Iranian script the calligrapher used,” he huffed. “Why, philologists will debate that sort of nonsense till eternity.” (Those were Adams’s exact words, as quoted in my article.)

When I pointed out that art historians were troubled by the presence of Prussian blue, a pigment developed in the 19th century—in a work supposedly created hundreds of years earlier—Adams turned scornful.

“Oh, please,” he said. “That happens all the time with Persian manuscripts. Someone just wanted to make it look prettier.

“And our manuscript,” he continued, “is much more than merely pretty. When the work was first introduced at that conference in Istanbul, a German scholar noted, ‘If it’s a forgery, it was forged by a Persian Picasso.’ ” (That’s a direct quote from my June 30, 1960 Cincinnati Enquirer article.)

After a significant pause, Adams added, “You know, a few weeks ago an important collector called me and offered to buy the entire manuscript for considerably more than we paid for it.”

That impressed me even more. Who was the collector? I inquired.

His name was unimportant, Adams responded, adding, “The point is we’re a museum, a public trust. We cannot possibly let a work like the Andarz Nama go back to the private sector. That would be irresponsible.”

This sounded fishy to me. But without the name of the collector, there was no way for me to check if the offer had been made. Inexperienced as I was, I didn’t know how to persuade Adams to come clean. Instead, I changed the subject and asked him who he thought I should contact so I could understand the academic controversy better.

“Arthur Upham Pope” was his response. “He’s the greatest expert we’ve got.”

Pope, to this day regarded as a foundational figure in the study of ancient Persian art, sounded grumpy when I explained the purpose of my call.

“Who gave you my number?”

“Mr. Adams, sir, the director of the museum. He asked me to send you his greetings.”

“Oh, Phil,” he said, chuckling. “That poor fellow’s got himself in a pretty pickle.”

My alarm detector went off. “You mean you think the manuscript’s a fake?”

“I said nothing of the sort, young man. Don’t misquote me.”

“But at the conference, scholars were saying that the miniatures used modern paint.”

“Scholars say lots of things. That happens at conferences.”

“But doesn’t that mean that the Andarz Nama can’t be an ancient—”

“It means it’s under investigation, and I’ve got a busy day,” he said—and hung up.

I was perplexed. Why wouldn’t Pope just tell me whether the manuscript was fake or not? The sorry truth is I knew nothing about the complexities of art attribution. I also failed to realize that my article could endanger Pope’s and Adams’s professional standing. I blithely assumed my journalistic quest was just another juicy story, not a career-destroying inquisition.

A detail from the Andarz Nama manuscript, left, shows examples of blue spots on a tree trunk. A sample of these spots, photomicrographed 300 times, right, identifies the color as Prussian Blue—a modern pigment.
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Over the next few days, I launched a flurry of calls to various experts in ancient Persian art, who invariably asked what Pope had to say. When I told them that he hadn’t come to a conclusion, they clammed up. (At the time, I didn’t understand that Pope’s eminence in the field was absolutely unchallenged—that his was the final and definitive word.)

Despite the scholars’ reticence, despite Pope’s and Adams’s prickliness, I found the four or five days I spent jousting with them delightful, even exhilarating. What a cool assignment that was, what enormous fun!

It wasn’t fun when Arthur Upham Pope suddenly called me out of the blue. He was searing mad.

“Now, see here, young man, just what do you think you’re doing?”

“Sir, sorry, but I’m just trying to get to the bottom—”

“That’s not your job! You’re not an expert. You’ve got no right going around bothering serious scholars when—”

I swallowed hard. “Sir, I wasn’t bothering anyone. They were perfectly—”

“That’s beside the point. The question of authenticity can only be resolved by serious long-term scholarly examination. We’ll convene next year for further investigation. Until then, you’ve got no right to claim that the Andarz Nama is a modern forgery!”

“I haven’t done that. I just wanted to—”

“And I do not allow you to quote anything I may have said. My comments were entirely off the record and not for publication. I’m a serious scholar, and we don’t decide things on the front pages of newspapers. Furthermore, under no circumstances do I allow you to cite me or my comments in any manner, shape, or form. My name must absolutely NOT appear in your article. You don’t have my permission to use it. Have I made myself clear?”

I had no idea whether or not he was legally empowered to make that sort of demand. I wasn’t an expert on the ethics and legalities of journalism. Hell, I hadn’t even graduated from college yet. In my befuddlement, I promised not to mention his name—and felt like a total wimp.

Wimp or not, I set to work on my article. I hadn’t gotten far, maybe a page or two, when Rad rushed over to my desk.

“I just got a call from your biggest fan—Phil Adams.” He grinned. “He said the museum would sue us if your article called that old manuscript a fake.”

I was shocked. “He could do that?”

“Maybe. I just checked with the guys in legal, and they don’t want us risking a lawsuit over some cockamamie ancient manuscript.”

“Meaning exactly what?” My stomach grew queasy. I felt like a little kid again—fearful and alone.

“Come on, cheer up; it’s no big deal,” said Rad. “Just write one of those on the one hand, on the other hand articles. Say there’s a big controversy, but tilt in favor of the museum.”

I followed Rad’s advice and, oddly enough, enjoyed it. It was fun to sort through a highly specialized dispute and make it comprehensible to the general reader. I was also surprised about how easy it was to adjust my text to the museum’s advantage.

The author’s original article in The Cincinnati Inquirer.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .

When I turned in my piece, I discovered to my utter amazement that I had hit journalistic gold. The city editor liked it so much that he quoted from it on the front page, right under a comment from the premier of Norway about East-West relations. A 20-year-old cub reporter snagged a front-page byline.

After a while, though, reality sank in. I felt used by Adams and Pope—corrupted. I was ashamed to have implied that the manuscript was old, when I knew deep down it had to be a modern fake.

Phil Adams’s tenure at the Cincinnati Art Museum was unaffected by my say-nothing article. In 1965, the institution opened the Adams-Emery Wing, honoring him along with a former board chairman.

As for Arthur Upham Pope, he continued to advise major American museums and collectors. He eventually moved to Isfahan, the former capital of Safavid Iran, with his wife, the textile expert Phyllis Ackerman. Their mausoleum, a gift from the Shah of Iran, still stands in a shaded grove there. Pope’s once peerless reputation, however, has taken a hit. A number of ancient artifacts he purchased for American collections are now viewed as 20th-century fakes. (The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, for example, lists a silver salver it bought from him as “Seljuk, 1066–67 C.E., possibly a modern forgery.”)

As for the Andarz Nama, I searched diligently through the Cincinnati Art Museum’s extensive digital catalog and found no trace of it. When I discussed its seeming disappearance with Margaret Graves, the Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture at Brown University, she told me that while the Andarz Nama manuscript was no doubt still at the museum, it was now widely considered by experts to be a mid–20th century forgery.

In other words, my hunch 65 years ago was right. My 20-year-old self is finally vindicated.

Ian Strasfogel is an author, opera director, and impresario who has staged over a hundred productions of opera and music theater in European and American opera houses and music festivals. His comic novel, Operaland, and his biography of his father, Ignace Strasfogel: The Rediscovery of a Musical Wunderkind, were both published in 2021.

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