Abstract

This article examines the visual language of Reza Abbasi’s paintings through the interpretive lens of Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology, with particular emphasis on persona, shadow, and individuation. The central problem is how the transformation of Reza Abbasi’s imagery across three artistic periods can be read as a meaningful relation between visual form and the layered dynamics of the psyche, in which shifting modes of depiction reflect shifting configurations of selfhood and otherness.

The purpose of the study is to clarify how changes in the visual organization of Reza Abbasi’s paintings correspond to changes in the representation of the human figure, lived subjectivity, and the cultural imagination embedded in the pictorial field. The article therefore attends not only to iconographic content but also to the formal and affective qualities through which meaning is produced, including linear refinement, bodily posture, compositional economy, spatial restraint, the treatment of emptiness, chromatic nuance, and the emotional tonality of the depicted figures. Methodologically, the research is developmental in orientation and qualitative in nature, employing a descriptive–analytical approach. It is grounded in Jungian analytical psychology and uses concepts such as the collective unconscious, archetype, persona, shadow, and individuation as interpretive tools. By combining these concepts with visual analysis and art-historical insights into Safavid painting, the study adopts an interdisciplinary framework for interpreting Reza Abbasi’s works.

The findings suggest that the first phase of Reza Abbasi’s production is marked by the predominance of persona. In these works, elegantly composed courtly figures, idealized physiognomies, harmonious color relations, and highly controlled visual structures construct a public and socially codified image of identity. The refinement of contour, the balance of ornamental detail, and the restraint of gesture all contribute to a visual regime aligned with the representational logic of the Safavid court. In the second phase, however, this ordered surface gives way to a more inward and unstable mode of representation. The increasing presence of dervishes, solitary men, ordinary subjects, and emotionally charged figures points to an expanded pictorial attention to marginality, vulnerability, and psychic depth. From a Jungian perspective, this phase may be interpreted through the emergence of the shadow, insofar as the image begins to register dimensions of experience that lie outside official and idealized identity and unsettle the earlier coherence of the visual persona.

In the third phase, the paintings disclose a relative reconciliation of these opposing tendencies. The courtly and the non-courtly, the composed and the affective, the external and the inward are brought into a more integrated visual relationship. This integration may be understood as analogous to individuation, not as a literal psychological biography of the artist, but as an interpretive model for reading the increasing complexity of visual form, spatial organization, and human presence in the works. Accordingly, Reza Abbasi’s paintings may be seen as a site where the tensions between conscious cultural identity and deeper collective psychic layers are made visible, negotiated, and aesthetically elaborated within the visual language of Safavid painting.