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LECTURE
Persianizing Europe in the Safavid and Qajar Art.
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Summary
In a talk given at MEKIC on November 19th, Dr. Abbas Amanat, a historian from Yale University summarized the history of painting in Iran between the 17th and 19th centuries. In front of a large audience, he traced the history of the Safavid and Qajar periods.
Iran has in fact a very old tradition of painting that goes back to Mani (200 A.D.). Mani was the founder of Manichaenism at the time of the Sassanid era. The book Arjang of that time contains some of his paintings. With the Arab conquest, the influence of Islam prohibits representations of the human figure. However, the painting tradition survived in the books at the time of the Abbasid of Baghdad (10th and 11th centuries) and of the Il Khanids (12th and 13th centuries).
In our modern times, Iran is in direct contact with European painting of the 16th and 17th centuries. Under King Abbas of the Safavid dynasty, the influence of European arts and literature is very present in Iran and especially in a large city such as Ispahan. At that time, the realisation of kingly portraits marks the development of the Qajar period from 1786 to 1925. This form of art, after being a court instrument, becomes an artistic mode of expression of its own. Without its royal patronage, it becomes, like in Europe, a mode of expression of satirical ideas and of social critique.
Abbas Amanat defends the idea that the Qajar period, especially under the Pahlavi (Iran’s Shah) regime was an original one and that it was under the influence of European art. According to Amanat, several artists like Sani-ol-milk (1814-1866) – one of Iran’s modern times most important artist – managed to assimilate aspects of European art, but at the same time, kept their own identity.
One of the most significant pieces of art produced in the Islamic world, in the post-Safavid period, is six volumes and 6000 illustrations of the Thousand and One Nights. This monumental piece of work is kept at the Golestân Museum in Tehran. However, no reproduction of it is found in the Islamic Republic of Iran as the images it contains are thought to be ‘pornographic’.
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