An Overview of Influential Elements on Persian Painting

Research about Persian painting (generally, all objects of Art), has its own difficulties. One of these difficulties, of course, is that, how was its creation. The creation of any object of art, is a twisted problem, deals with several factors, some apparent some stealth, but never a fixed number of them existed that could act like variables. In this paper, we tried, with help of some obvious considerations, to find some of these factors. The seven factors that we consider as seven principal points of act are content patterns (stereotypes/ icons), formal patterns (formal traditions/styles), patron, social- economical- political- religious conditions, primary context, artist (whether single artist or a group of them) and audience. All of these elements have not an equal place in comparison with the others. Audience is the most important one, because it has a twosome projection, in one hand, it have an influence on formation of painting (the painting is for audience whether it is a single king or a wide range of scholars or a wider one of usual people), in the other hand, it is the audience that uses (= read, look and so on) the painting and as a user, he is the true interpreter of that. The elements of formation of paintings are not the variables that can posit in any situation they are just factors that have causal and random roles. So is their scale of influence in each painting that cannot be determined. We have tried to introduce and explain all seven elements with the case study by a painting from baysunghuri Shahname:” lament of faramarz on coffins of his father, rustam, and his uncle, zavare.” This painting has not any special formal or conceptual elements that merits over the other painting, and just this make it a potential one for neutral study. Of course without any special mode, this painting has some important aspect in case of storytelling. First, the story is a secondary one and has no importance in Shahname. Second, the baysunghuri Shahname is an important one and has been produced for special purpose, that is, maybe, the ambition of baysunghur for reign. In any case, this painting has some important implications that is more than telling a story. The death of rustam as a most important hero in Shahname, have not been painted, just his coffin and this is the act of defamiliarization of this painting. For interpreting this factorial element, one must look for an element that conjoins form and content. In this case, the linker is Arabic phrases, who by verbal means, try to transfer the contents that mean for artist. In this case, the content is fatalism. In other word, every text has two conceptual modes. On is denotation and the other is connotation. By denotation, we mean what the object of art shows directly and by connotation, what the object shows covertly and, of course, the connotation mode can be artificial or otherwise natural. The end of paper will deal with the meaning of the painting.