Painting and Book Arts in Safavid Iran

The Safavid dynasty ruled Iran from 1501 until 1736; its court lost Isfahan in 1722. Within the cultural world of Safavid Iran, painters made images for royal books, individual collectors and palace rooms. A large illustrated manuscript brought calligraphers, painters, illuminators and binders into a coordinated sequence of work. By the seventeenth century, collectors also prized separate painted sheets assembled with calligraphy into albums, while painters covered palace walls with scenes for audiences and guests.

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A royal manuscript made across a generation

Shah Tahmasp’s Shahnama, or “Book of Kings”, was a copy of Ferdowsi’s Persian epic made in the royal workshop at Tabriz in northwestern Iran. Begun in the 1520s, the manuscript contains 759 folios, or leaves, and 258 paintings. Two generations of artists worked on it over more than twenty years. The text is written in nasta‘liq, a flowing Persian script. Broad gold-sprinkled borders, colored illumination and paintings in ink, opaque watercolor, silver and gold give its pages a layered surface.

Making this book required a sequence of skilled tasks. Safavid workshop production began with paper makers forming sheets from linen and hemp rags, then coating them with starch so ink and paint would adhere. A director planned the space for text and image; scribes copied the verses, and the director checked their writing before painters began. Painters first sketched compositions lightly, then filled them with pigments made from minerals such as lapis lazuli and malachite, metals, and plant or insect dyes. Illuminators added gold to borders, headings and text frames, then polished the gilded pages with hard stones such as agate. After the pages were polished, a binder stitched the leaves together and attached a decorated leather or lacquer cover.

The work joined artists associated with different centers. Sultan Muhammad, Mir Musavvir and Aqa Mirak directed the project at different stages; Kamal al-Din Behzad taught Tahmasp in Herat, in western Afghanistan, and headed the royal library. The paintings combine lively color and patterned surfaces associated with Tabriz and Shiraz in southern Iran with the balanced compositions of Timurid Herat. On some folios, painted scenes pass between text columns and spread into the margins, allowing the image to frame the written story across the page.

Not long after completion, Tahmasp sent the Shahnama as part of an embassy gift to the Ottoman sultan Selim II, who had taken the throne in 1566. The Iranian embassy reached the Ottoman court in 1568. The manuscript’s journey carried the lavish Safavid commission into the Ottoman palace library, where it remained for centuries before its pages were dispersed among collections.

Book covers and album sheets

Bookbinding added its own painted and tooled surface. In Safavid workshops, bookbinders pressed engraved metal plates into damp leather, sometimes laying gold beneath the heated die so it impressed and gilded a floral design at once. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, makers in Tabriz and Isfahan also painted cover boards built up from layers of wastepaper, or papier-mâché, and sealed the images with clear protective coats.

A muraqqa‘ was an album of calligraphic pieces or drawings mounted on paper reinforced with thin cloth. It let a collector arrange individual works together rather than commission hundreds of illustrations for one epic. Riza-yi Abbasi, a leading painter at Shah Abbas I’s court, helped make single figures and intimate encounters prominent subjects. His 1630 painting The Lovers shows two figures entwined within one curving outline. Ink, opaque watercolor and gold on paper give the small scene a rich surface, while Riza’s line and palette direct attention to posture and expression.

Royal manuscript projects continued as single paintings reached new buyers. Urban elites, Armenian merchants, foreign visitors and artists collecting each other’s work could buy individual sheets, which cost less than a fully illustrated manuscript and gave painters work beyond the court library. This market for single-page works grew alongside manuscript commissions.

Workshops across Safavid cities

Painting followed the court as the capital moved. Tabriz was the first capital; Tahmasp transferred the court to Qazvin in northwestern Iran in 1548. A Shahnama from Shah Ismail II’s brief reign in 1576–77, probably made in Qazvin, uses pared-down scenes, washes of landscape color and carefully ruled borders. Shiraz artists in southern Iran continued to supply luxury illustrated manuscripts to merchant buyers. In 1598 Shah Abbas I established Isfahan in central Iran as the capital, and its court workshop supported Riza and his pupil Muin Musavvir, who led a productive workshop of his own. Illustrated books also circulated beyond royal libraries: a 1648 Shahnama was made for Qarajaghay Khan, the governor of Mashhad in northeastern Iran.

Palace walls and artistic exchange

At Chehel Sotun in Isfahan, Shah Abbas II added a pavilion whose walls carried large paintings of historical and literary encounters for palace audiences. A Safavid fresco depicting lovers adapts a Dutch print that reached Iran through European illustrated books, pictures and visitors. Persian painters used modeled volume and receding space; foreshortening, which shortens forms extending away from the viewer, helps suggest depth. They combined such devices with familiar subjects and local conventions.

Safavid-trained artists also traveled to Mughal India. At Akbar’s court, their work entered illustrated manuscripts in which Persian training met Indian and European visual elements.