With the establishment of the periodical world exhibitons in Europe by the mid-nineteenth century, and its impact on cultural organization and dynamics of image production, a new episteme emerged to dominate cultural and political discourses. According to Timothy Mitchell, a political theorist and a contributor to postcolonial theory, the methods of organization and classification used by world exhibitions have gradually encompassed the whole world and consequently have led to a new world order which Mitchell calls the exhibitionary order. Mitchell argues that world exhibitions not only institutionalized the representations of the world, but also organized and controlled them.
This article elaborates on this theme by concentrating on illustrated copies of Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in an era dominated by the exhibionary order, sometimes between 1870s to 1940s. It also discusses the empistemological aspects of the new paradigm in forging originality for illustrated translation of Rubaiyat in English, where there is no clear affiliation with the original poetry in Persian and various historical schools of poetry illustration in Iran and the Persianate world. While there is a huge body of illustrated manuscripts of numerous Persian poets, there is not any considerable evidence of Illustrated Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam before the twentieth century.
While the orientalist pictorial approaches are prominant in the Euro-American tradition of illustrating the Rubaiyat, it seems that the revival movement of miniature painting of the early-twenteeieth century in Iran was highly influenced by such Western tradition. As an immediate impact some Iranian miniature painters of the revival movement began illustrating the Rubaiyat in Persian. A secondary tradition was formed that implicitly authenticated the primary Western tradition and furnished it with examples similar to old schools of Persian miniatrure painting.