Princes, Dervishes and Dragons

Toward the end of the nineteenth century much of Iran's architectural heritage gave way to urban development. Among the casualties were the seventeenth-century Safavid palaces of Isfahan. Local dealers salvaged a series of astonishingly beautiful pictorial arch-shaped panels composed of cuerda seca tiles from one of these. Beginning in 1911 whole panels and many single tiles were sold through Hagop Kevorkian. The authors have assembled (digitally) 36 friezes once part of this set. The iconographic program consisted of three themes: secular pastimes (picnics, hunt, games), Persian literary episodes, and religious festivals (e.g., the Ashura). The first two themes have a long history in Iranian mural painting, but the third was new and will be of interest to cultural historians. The friezes are stylistically datable to c. 1685-95. One clue to the identity of the original site is the duplication of almost all the friezes. The authors deduce that the scenes were paired across a courtyard and suggest three possible sites. Fully assembled, the suite emerges as a hitherto unknown, outstanding creation that should be added to the canon of Safavid art.

Lisa Golombek (Curator Emerita, Royal Ontario Museum, Department of World Cultures, Islamic Arts; PhD., U. of Michigan, 1968. At ROM since 1967) is Professor Emerita at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations at the University of Toronto. She is author and co-author of five books and over 70 articles covering a wide range of topics in the field of Islamic arts, including architecture (The Timurid Architecture of Iran and Turan with D. Wilber, 1988, Princeton U. Press), ceramics, epigraphy, textiles, and Persian gardens. The author has extensive experience in fieldwork covering the areas of her research (Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia) and many other countries in the Middle East. While she has published on the arts of the wider Islamic world, her main focus has been on the cultures of greater Iran, including Afghanistan and Central Asia. Her period of specialty was the fifteenth century, but since taking on the study of Safavid pottery, her interests have shifted to the pre-modern period in Iran (c. 1600–1900). The Isfahan Urban History Project, carried out in 1974–76, traced the historical growth of the city and laid the foundations for her later research on Safavid palaces. The hunt for tiles across the globe in order to re-create the Safavid tile arcade has led to investigation into the dispersal of the Iranian cultural heritage by dealers catering to demand from European markets in the late nineteenth century. This material forms a chapter unto itself in the book. Robert B. Mason (PhD., U. of Oxford, 1994; Royal Ontario Museum, Collections Database Manager; Associate Professor, Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations Department, University of Toronto) is an archaeologist, anthropologist, art-historian, geologist, and materials scientist whose experience and research has included study of the art, technology, trade, and industry from the beginnings of time to the industrial revolution around the world. A particular area of specialisation is the material culture and archaeology of the Middle East and Europe during the Islamic and Mediaeval periods (roughly 500 AD to the present).