The 'Shahnama' is a terrifying book. Not because it is long, though with 50,000 verses, it is long indeed. Nor because it is dry or taxing on the reader. As translator Dick Davis demonstrated in his 1997 rendering of the 'Shahnama,' or 'Persian Book of Kings,' into English, it is endlessly delightful and readable. But in between its tales of love and betrayal, arrogance and justice, its depiction of mortality and the essence of being is as dark as any existentialist vision of the 20th century. Kings and heroes come forth, strive, fight, conquer and die, and in dying, their lives are snuffed like the punch line to a bad joke. 'He had lived for seven hundred years,' the epic 10th-century poem written by Abolqasem Frowsy says of one of the most magnificent and beneficent of kings. 'But what good is long life, since the world will never reveal her secrets to you?' The small paintings in the Sackler Gallery's exhibition 'Shahnama: 1000 Years of the Persian Book of Kings' feel like colorful exceptions to the book's endless cycles of generation and decay. But there's no contradiction between their bright colors and often playful rendering of beloved moments in the poem and the Shahnama's larger insistence on the intractable, unknowable veil over life and the meaning of existence. The darkness, in the 'Shahnama,' is all in the interstices, in the silences and moral reflection between the stories. But while the stories are in motion, the book is a brilliant, beguiling display of life. The illustrations gathered by curator Masumeh Farhad date from the 14th to 16th centuries, well after Frowsy wrote his poem late in the culturally brilliant Samanid dynasty. Several visual styles are represented, from 14th-century renderings in which the faces and folds of fabric feel rather like medieval Christian images, to late-15th-century paintings (watercolor, ink and gold on paper) from the Turkoman period, in which the figures are boldly, evenly crudely represented, with large bodies and heads, almost like cartoon characters. But the infinitely detailed and delicate renderings from Tabriz, made around 1520, steal the show. In one Tabriz painting of the hero Rostam discovering his faithful horse Rakhsh, small tufts of grass grow from a blue-gray earth, while horses cavort among flowers, and a wide-eyed mother calmly nurses her eager foal. The hero, one of the most popular figures in the 'Shahnama,' is painted small, low on the page and off to one side, but a strong pattern of diagonal design makes it clear Rostam with his lasso is the focal point of the action. The result is a compelling mix of modesty and centrality, which in some ways is the lesson that almost every king must learn, or risk losing the royal 'farr,' or divine glory, that determines a ruler's fate. A constant inner battle is waged between glory and humility, heroism and service. Rostam will spend his days doing what kings should do: cleaning up the world and rescuing a foolhardy ruler from his own incompetence. In another Tabriz painting, depicting Rostam's father Zal, an albino hero raised from infancy in the nest of a mythical bird known as the simurgh, details of the fantastical creature's feathers are rendered with microscopic precision. The museum provides magnifying glasses, a helpful invitation to look closely at these fantastically delicate images. More odd, and requiring a different sort of visual acuity to detect, are ghostly human faces hidden in the effusions of color that represent mountains. They aren't so much hidden 'Where's Waldo?'-style as integrated into the lines and rhythm of the drawing, as the cartoonist Hirschfeld used to hide the name Nina in his Broadway theater cartoons. The paintings also mimic the descriptive style of the poem, in which people and places are built up from an accumulation of detail, a list of attributes, a collection of finery. In one brief description of a beautiful woman, the poem enumerates musk, gold coins, saffron, rubies, emeralds, Chinese brocade, pearls, turquoise, 'gorgeous cloth,' black curls and 'a paradise of tints and scents.' None of this is surprising in a poem written during a splendid age, in a land crossed and defined by the Silk Road. But this richness of the material, translated into a painting, requires a particular type of looking and appreciation. There's no single, quick grasp of any image. Rather, the surface of the painting stays constantly in the foreground, and what impresses, over time, is the careful, geometric divisions that allow the painter to fill the space with the poem's laundry list of stuff. Sometimes the border of the drawing can contain this overstocked space. But often, as in another Tabriz drawing showing the arrival of a foreign mission to the court of Nurshirvan, the architecture of a palace overwhelms the arbitrary lines of the rectangular border, a tree bursts through the top of the image, and rooms, terraces and towers expand the pictorial space into the terra incognito of the blank page. The images are snapshots of particular moments from the poem; each picture is the poetic narrative itself, the story line that brings the viewer to this particular moment, and then beyond it to the rest of the story. On another level, the beyond seems to be in the images themselves, with their super-fine suggestion of infinite degrees of detail beyond the ability of the naked eye. In that last image, 'The Bier of Iskander,' from around 1330, the great Greek philosopher Aristotle cries over the casket of Alexander (as he's known outside Persia) as if entirely bereft of equanimity and wisdom. The exhibition wall panel recounts for the viewer the relevant passage from Frowsy's poem: 'There is nothing in the world so terrible and fearful as the fact that one comes like the wind and departs as a breath.' That line, and this image, can make you lose your way in the world. Or you can just turn the page and keep reading. - - - 'Shahnama: 1000 Years of the Persian Book of Kings' is at the Sackler Gallery, 1050 Independence Ave. SW, through April 17. Admission is free. Call 202-633-4880 or visit asia.si.edu. 