This information resulted from a close exploration of the treasury of Oriental manuscripts. Added to the well-known miniatures of the Paris National Library, and these in the Bodleian Library, in Oxford, there now was an enriched collection of Oriental manuscripts in Dublin, in the Bodleian Library; in the Saltikov-Shchedrin Library and in the Institute of Oriental Studies in Leningrad, also in Tashkent, in the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Uzbek Academy of Sciences. Alongside miniatures of unsurpassed artistic value far less perfect works have been found; however, the latter are not to be underestimated as they are the missing links in the entire evolution of the Central Asian school, which by now has been recognized as an established fact.
The book comprises the most characteristic miniatures of the fifteenth-seventeenth centuries, some of which are a first publication. Although the miniature cannot claim the role of a high road in World Fine Arts, it is unquestionably one of its paths that also ends up in the land of the Beautiful.