Real Birds in Imagined Gardens
Real Birds in Imagined Gardens

Author: Kavita Singh

Publisher: Getty Publications

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1606065181

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Accounts of paintings produced during the Mughal dynasty (1526–1857) tend to trace a linear, “evolutionary” path and assert that, as European Renaissance prints reached and influenced Mughal artists, these artists abandoned a Persianate style in favor of a European one. Kavita Singh counters these accounts by demonstrating that Mughal painting did not follow a single arc of stylistic evolution. Instead, during the reigns of the emperors Akbar and Jahangir, Mughal painting underwent repeated cycles of adoption, rejection, and revival of both Persian and European styles. Singh’s subtle and original analysis suggests that the adoption and rejection of these styles was motivated as much by aesthetic interest as by court politics. She contends that Mughal painters were purposely selective in their use of European elements. Stylistic influences from Europe informed some aspects of the paintings, including the depiction of clothing and faces, but the symbolism, allusive practices, and overall composition remained inspired by Persian poetic and painterly conventions. Closely examining magnificent paintings from the period, Singh unravels this entangled history of politics and style and proposes new ways to understand the significance of naturalism and stylization in Mughal art.

Qajar Portraits
Qajar Portraits

Author: Julian Raby

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 108

ISBN-13:

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Qajar Portraits is a beautifully-illustrated, comprehensive overview of Qajar imperial portraiture. The items, which include several of the most important works of early Qajar art, clearly depict the political role of portraiture under the Qajars and the influence of Napoleonic portraits on the development of Persia’s early-20th century imperial iconography under Fath ‘Ali Shah, and the use of portraiture in Qajar civil and military Orders of Merit. No other Muslim dynasty, except the Mughals, used portraiture as intensively to further dynastic and political ends.

Peerless Images
Peerless Images

Author: Vice-President Eleanor G Sims

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2002-01-01

Total Pages: 386

ISBN-13: 0300090382

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This book is the first survey of the figural arts of the Iranian world from prehistoric times to the early twentieth century ever to consider themes, rather than styles. Analyzing primarily painting - in manuscripts and albums, on walls and on lacquered, painted pen boxes and caskets - but also the related arts of sculpture, ceramics, and metalwork, the author finds that the underlying themes depicted on them through the ages are remarkably consistent. Eleanor Sims demonstrates that all these arts display similar concerns: kingship and legitimacy; the righteous exercise of princely power and the defense of national territory; and the performance of rituals and the religious duties called for by the paramount cult of the day. She describes a variety of superb works of art inside and outside these categories, noting not only how they illustrate archetypal themes but also what it is about them that is unique. She also discusses the ways that Iranian art both influenced and was influenced by invaders and neighboring lands. Boris I. Marshak discusses pre-Islamic and also Central Asian art, in particular the earliest Iranian wall paintings and their pictorial parallels in rock carvings and metalwork, and the richly painted temples and houses of Panjikent. Ernst J. Grube considers religious imagery, and provides an informative bibliography.

Royal Persian Paintings
Royal Persian Paintings

Author: Basil William Robinson

Publisher:

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13:

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Iranian art of the Qajar period (1779-1925) has long been neglected and is little understood. This beautifully illustrated book for the first time comprehensively examines the flowering of Persian painting and the visual arts of this period. It focuses on the growth of a remarkable tradition of life-size figural painting, virtually unseen in the Islamic world. Exquisite historic manuscripts, lacquer works, calligraphies and enamels further illuminate the subject. The Qajar Epoch carries essays by leading scholars exploring the historical and social context of the period. Detailed entries describing and interpreting a wide variety of painting and artifacts, many hitherto unseen masterpieces from museums such as the Hermitage and private collections are virtually all illustrated in color and accompanied by translations of inscriptions, technical appendices and extensive bibliographies. A unique reference work, The Qajar Epoch will appeal to both specialist of pre-modern Iran and all those interested in non-Western artistic and cultural traditions.

Liminalities of Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iranian Photography
Liminalities of Gender and Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century Iranian Photography

Author: Staci Gem Scheiwiller

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2016-12-01

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1315512122

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Nineteenth-century Iran was an ocularcentered society predicated on visuality and what was seen and unseen, and photographs became liminal sites of desire that maneuvered "betwixt and between" various social spaces—public, private, seen, unseen, accessible, and forbidden—thus mapping, graphing, and even transgressing those spaces, especially in light of increasing modernization and global contact during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Of primary interest is how photographs negotiated and coded gender, sexuality, and desire, becoming strategies of empowerment, of domination, of expression, and of being seen. Hence, the photograph became a vehicle to traverse multiple locations that various gendered physical bodies could not, and it was also the social and political relations that had preceded the photograph that determined those ideological spaces of (im)mobility. In identifying these notions in photographs, one may glean information about how modern Iran metamorphosed throughout its own long durée or resisted those societal transformations as a result of modernization.

The Shaping of Persian Art
The Shaping of Persian Art

Author: Yuka Kadoi

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2014-07-18

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 1443864498

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While the impact of the Persian style is undeniably reflected in most aspects of the art and architecture of Islamic Central Asia, this Perso-Central Asian connection was chiefly formed and articulated by the Euro-American movement of collecting and interpreting the art and material culture of the Persian Islamic world in modern times. This had an enormous impact on the formation of scholarship and connoisseurship in Persian art, for instance, with an attempt to define the characteristics of how the Islamic art of Iran and Central Asia should be viewed and displayed at museums, and how these subjects should be researched in academia. This important historical fact, which has attracted scholarly interest only in recent years, should be treated as a serious subject of research, accepting that the abstract image of Persian art was not a pure creation of Persian civilization, but that it can be the manifestation of particular historical times and charismatic individuals. Attention should therefore be given to various factors that resulted in the shaping of “Persian” imagery across the globe, not only in terms of national ideologies, but also within the context of several protagonists, such as scholars, collectors and dealers, as well as of the objects themselves. This volume brings together Islamic Iranian and Central Asian art experts from diverse disciplinary and professional backgrounds, and intends to offer a novel insight into what is collectively known as Persian art.

Technologies of the Image
Technologies of the Image

Author: David J. Roxburgh

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2017-01-01

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0300229194

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-This catalogue accompanies the exhibition Technologies of the Image: Art in 19th-Century Iran, on view at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts, from August 26, 2017 through January 7, 2018.-