Critical Visuality Analysis of Sexuality in Qajar`s Painting (Geneanalysis of Body and Face in School of Royal Portraiture)

Document Type : Research Paper

Author

Assistant Professor, Department of Advanced Art Studies, at the School of Visual Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.

Abstract

One of the historical schools of Persian painting is the school of Royal Portraiture, the peak of which is seen in the early Qajar era. The central theme of this type of painting is the human body, including young people as well as kings, princes, and dancer women with ideal beauty. These people are almost similar in terms of facial and body features, following a fixed image cliché. This has led the majority of researchers in this field to the idea that the features of beauty were considered and depicted equally for men and women. Although this statement is generally correct, it is not accurate. Therefore, this issue and the whys, especially in the case of the king and the princes, should be analyzed more carefully in these paintings. This essay tries to address such questions about the visual representation of sexuality in the visual culture of this period. In a conceptualization related to the discourse, the general atmosphere of imagery in the Qajar era can be considered as visuality; a type of critical visuality analysis can be done. This research is qualitative and basic, and in terms of method, a descriptive with synthetic analysis research is applied critically. The methodology of this research refers to the concept of "Geneanalysis” organizing the theoretical framework of this research in the social psychoanalytic approach; it is based on the ideas of Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan. What is called Geneanalysis is a dynamic combination of genealogy and psychoanalysis (social psychoanalysis). Compared to the Foucauldian genealogy, in geneanalysis, it is not the correlation of knowledge and power, but the relations of the "power and sexuality" that are analyzed. Sexuality, in this paper, is considered as a historical deployment, but it can be considered as the consequence of the struggle of the forces that are acting and interacting in the conscious and unconscious level of a society and each attempt to create a state of mind and a sign on body. Thus, geneanalysis of the face and body is one of the main goals of this essay. According to the importance and repetition of the portrait of the Shah, it can be seen that Fath-Ali Shah is the axis and nodal point of this visuality and also an image stereotype to represent beauty in addition to power, which is a morphological imitation for himself and others (princes and women) and in a kind of visual transformation is desirable and suitable for identification. Therefore, beauty, in our discussed visuality, first belongs to the king/father or the Other, and secondly, it belongs to others; this subject is the function of the imaginary of the society and according to the cultural history of Iran, it goes back to the image of the king in the Iranian collective unconscious. In this case, Yusuf can be considered as a prototype that has both the source of beauty and power and historically is projected in kings` image and even more deeply this image mythologically goes back to an archetype named Narse as a god-man.

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Main Subjects

References

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Journal of Fine Arts: Visual Arts
Volume 30, Issue 1
April 2025
Pages 49-62

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