From Dispersal to Collection, the subtitle of David Roxburgh’s The Persian Album, 1400–1600, cleverly alludes to several different aspects of this beautifully produced book on the albums of the court elite in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Iran. Its multivalent resonance hints at the text’s intellectual richness. Building on the foundations of codicology, Roxburgh shows that the albums themselves reveal how aesthetics and art history were understood in Timurid and Safavid court culture. At the simplest level, “from dispersal to collection” refers to the process by which the albums as material objects were produced. These albums are bound codices containing previously dispersed works on paper ranging from calligraphies to paintings to drawings and patterns. The first step in producing an album was to collect such works; these were then reformatted before being bound together. Equally, as a direct quotation from an album preface, “from dispersal to collection” foregrounds one of Roxburgh’s core arguments: that in their original historical milieu, the albums were understood not as random gatherings of materials, but as collections. Further, the subtitle aptly describes the critical shift in methodological approach to albums ushered in by Roxburgh’s work on this topic, which culminates in this book. Traditionally, the contents of...