Behzad portrays the Battle of Iskandar and Darius as a scene of pursuit of the enemy. The illustration shows a standard bearer with a royal banner proudly fluttering in the wind, musicians,warriors attack individual enemy soldiers, who, desperately resisting. In the center, a rider in a green kaba, wearing a helmet with a high plume, stands out from the other figures.
It should be especially noted how Behzad realistically expresses the full dynamics of the movement of the riders, depicting them from different angles. As in the previous miniatures, Behzad uses some traditional characters: for example, a horseman at the top, at full gallop piercing the enemy with a lance, or another escaping warrior cutting with a swing with a sword in the center (cf. the Shah-nama by Juki), but he never copies them and interprets them in his own way, adding realistic details. E.g., the rider, in whose back a spear is stabbed, has lost his helmet, and his horse stumbles: it is clear that he has lost this battle.
Behzad often repeats his own finds (the standard bearer and the drummer) or adds subtly noted details. E.g., in the left corner there is an image of a horseman attacked by foot soldiers – one, a white-bearded dark-faced old man pulls him by the legs from the horse, while the second, swinging a sword, grabs the horse by the bridle. Contemporaries not in vain recognized Behzad as a wonderful battle painter. In his works on the battle theme, he, as in other genres, improved the achievements of his predecessors in the field of composition and iconography, the interpretation of individual characters or scenes, he himself created original compositions that would later be used by his apprentices and followers.
You can learn more about the topic in the book-album "The legacy of Kamal ud-din Behzad in the World Collections" (L volume) in the series "Cultural Legacy of Uzbekistan in the World Collections".
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