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Invested with Life: Wall Painting and Imagery before the Qajars

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Layla S. Diba
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Extract

In the majority of Islamic countries, the art of painting has been restricted to non-figural and geometric designs in the public sphere, and strictly limited to small-scale narrative illustrations of manuscripts in the private sphere. By contrast, Qajar Iran witnessed the development of large-scale figural painting. Such a decisive break with Islamic tradition—where religious and social beliefs were primarily expressed through textual and calligraphic means—indicates that Iran possessed a distinctive, strongly visual culture. Nevertheless, Qajar painting has been perceived in the past as an offshoot of European easel painting.

In fact, Qajar painting, most particularly during the reign of the second ruler Fath ᶜAli Shah (1797-1834), represents the culmination of a long-standing indigenous tradition of imagery in both monumental painting and sculptural formats, primarily utilized for the decoration of palaces, exemplified by the bas reliefs and sculptures of the Achaemenid palace of Persepolis. Wall painting predated and subsequently coexisted with the better known traditions of decorative and manuscript painting.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 34 , Issue 1-4: Qajar Art and Society , 2001 , pp. 5 - 16
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 2001

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References

1. The sayings “Rustam-i dar-i ḥammām” (“a Rustam of the bathhouse door,” an ineffectual person) or “naqsh bar dīvār” (“picture on a wall,” i.e. a lifeless image) indicate an awareness of mural painting traditions, for instance. I am grateful to Ehsan Yarshater for this information.

2. First cited by Gray, Basil, “The Tradition of Wall Painting in Iran,” in Ettinghausen, Richard and Yarshater, Ehsan, eds., Highlights of Persian Art, (Boulder, 1979), 315.Google Scholar

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4. Kawami, Trudy, “Kuh-e Khwaja, Iran, and its Wall Painting: The Records of Ernst Herzfeld,” The Metropolitan Museum Journal, (1987): 5.Google Scholar Reconstructions of the paintings rendered by Ernst Herzfeld should be used with caution. Two extant fragments in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (nos. 45.99.1 and 45.99.2) exhibit greater similarities with the Mesopotamian painting of ninth-century Samarra.

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15. As cited in Arnold, Thomas W., Painting in Islam, a Study of the Place of Pictorial Art in Muslim Culture (Oxford, 1928), 26.Google Scholar The information is recorded in the Taẕkirat al-Awliyā by ᶜAttar, a biographical work on Sufi saints, in the entry on Abu Saᶜid ibn Abi'l-Khayr. There it is reported that he admonished his father, the sultan's painter, to destroy a painting described in the text as glorifying the ruler instead of God, and his father did so!

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18. See my essay, “Images of Power and the Power of Images: Intention and Response in Early Qajar Painting (1785-1834) in Royal Persian Paintings, ed. Diba, Layla S. with Ekhtiar, Maryam (New York, 1998), 38,Google Scholar for a further discussion.

19. See Simpson, Marianna S., “Narrative Allusion and Metaphor in the Decoration of Medieval Islamic Objects,” in Kessler, Herbert L. and Simpson, Marianna Shreve, eds., Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Studies in the History of Art, 15: 131–49Google Scholar for a discussion of imagery on Persian ceramics and A. S. Melikian-Chirvani, “Varqe et Golshah,” in Arts Asiatiques, special issue, 1970, for a study of the single illustrated poetic manuscript of the period.

20. Nizami, Kulliyāt-i Khamsa (Tehran 1344/1965), 687Google Scholar; also Soucek, P. P., “Nizami on Painters and Painting,” in Islamic Art in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, ed. Ettinghausen, R. (New York, 1972), 10–21.Google Scholar

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22. See Grabar, Oleg and Blair, Sheila, Epic Images and Contemporary History: The Illustrations of the Great Mongol Shahnama (Chicago, 1980), 87Google Scholar, 113, 135, 145 for illustrations.

23. SPA, 3: 1047.

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25. See Lentz, Thomas H., “Dynastic Imagery in Early Timurid Wall Painting,” Muqarnas 10 (1993): 253–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar for the most comprehensive study of Timurid wall painting and its textual sources and Arnold, T. W., Painting in Islam, 27Google Scholar, for further discussion of descriptions in historical sources.

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27. First cited in Lentz, “Dynastic Imagery,” 263.Google Scholar Thomas Lentz has also argued that large extant drawings of figures preserved in the albums of paintings and drawings compiled in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and located in the Topkapu Saray Library served as sketches for these murals (loc. cit.)

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30. al-Din Mahmud Vasifi, Zayn, Badāᵓiᶜ al-waqāᵓiᶜ ed. Boldyrev, A. N., 2 vols. (Moscow, 1961), 907–10.Google Scholar

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33. Topkapu Saray Library, Istanbul, no. R910.

34. Babaie, Sussan, “Safavid Palaces at Isfahan: Continuity and Change (1550-1666),” (Ph.D. dissertation, New York University, 1994), 325.Google Scholar

35. L. Diba, “Images of Power,” 33-34, note 17.

36. Diba, L., “Images of Power,” 42Google Scholar, note 81 and McChesney, R. D., “Four Sources on Shah ᶜAbbas's Building of Isfahan,” Muqamas 5 (1988): 107.Google Scholar

37. Nadir Shah's palace at Qazvin was exclusively decorated with floral and vegetal designs in Indian style, although Safavid figural paintings still survived in the older sections of the palace. His stronghold at Kalat-i Nadiri was similarly decorated, excepting a few badly defaced paintings of figures in eighteenth-century costume in interior niches. See Hanway, Jonas, An Historical Account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea, 2nd edition (London, 1754), 1: 156–57Google Scholar and Curatola, Giovanni, “Kalat-i Naderi, note sul ‘Barocco’ Indio-Persano, Quaderni del Seminario di Iranistica, Uralo-Altaistica e Caucasologia dell Universita degli Studi di Venezia, part 4 (Venice, 1983), 8–13,Google Scholar respectively. An extensively restored hunting lodge near Baku is embellished with wall paintings of battles; these murals are dated from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. See Salamzade, A. R., Dvoretz shekinskikh khanov/The Palace of the Sheki Khans (Baku, 1986), 20–21.Google Scholar

38. Dr. Cook, John, Voyages and Travels Through the Russian Empire. Tartary and Part of the Kingdom of Persia (Edinburgh, 1770), 517.Google Scholar Cassel was subsequently said to have delayed delivery of the paintings so as to remain on the royal payroll, and was reprimanded by Nader Shah who felt that, “although the pictures had some resemblance, they had many faults and all looked younger than one Cassel had presented to the Shah formerly.” Cassel then abused the shah but was spared execution.

39. Varjavand, Parviz, “Khānah-i Zakī Khān bannāᵓī zība az sabk-i miᶜmārīya-i dawrān-i Zandīyah dar Shīrāz”, Bar-rasīhā-yi tārīkhī, 9 (1353/1974): 79–94.Google Scholar We may assert, however, that the citadel-palaces of Qajars evolved from eighteenth-century conditions and the increased building of fortified palaces such as the Shiraz citadel and its divankhanah.

40. Franklin, William, Observations Made on a Tour from Bengal to Persia in the Years 1786-7 (Calcutta, 1788), 23Google Scholar, previously cited in J. A. Lerner, “A Rock Relief of Fath ᶜAli Shah in Shiraz, Ars Orientalis 21 (1991): 42.Google Scholar Abu'l Fath Khan may refer to two historical figures. The first was head of the Bakhtiyari tribe defeated by Karim Khan in his rise to power; the second was Karim Khan's eldest son, a drunkard and incompetent but his designated heir and divanbegi (head of palace security and chief of police). Abu'l-Fath took part in the struggle for succession after Karim Khan's death and the last reference to him was his short-lived proclaimation as shah in Shiraz in 1779. See Perry, John, Karim Khan Zand: A History of Iran, 1747-79 (Chicago and London, 1979), 21–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar and passim for Abu'l-Fath Khan Bakhtyari and ibid., 283, 298, and passim, for Abu'l Fath Khan Zand.

41. Diba and Ekhtiar, Royal Persian Painting, 152-53, cat. no. 25.

42. Perry, Karim Khan Zand, 242.

43. L. Diba, “Images of Power,” 41-45.

44. Ibid., 30-49, for further discussion.