Persian art

• 1. Introduction

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  Persian art reaches back roughly seven thousand years, to a time when the inhabitants of Susa raised a temple on a great platform above the flat plain and filled the graves below it with painted ceramic vessels. Nearly two thousand of those pots were eventually recovered, most of them now housed in the Louvre. They are among the earliest evidence of what would become one of the richest artistic traditions in world history, spanning architecture, painting, weaving, pottery, calligraphy, metalworking, and sculpture.

  What made Persian art so durable? Why did its influence travel as far as Japan, China, India, and northern Europe? How did successive waves of conquest, first by Alexander the Great, then by Arab armies, then by Mongol horsemen, fail to extinguish it and sometimes even accelerate it? And what connected a nomadic metalworker in the Lorestān highlands around 1000 BC to a court painter working in Isfahan for Shah Abbas I six hundred years later? The answers lie in the successive chapters of one of humanity's longest artistic conversations, one that this documentary will now open.

• 2. The First Makers

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  Susa sits near the head of a story that stretches back to around 5000 BCE, when its earliest inhabitants were already producing painted pottery. By the Uruk period, Susa had fallen so thoroughly within the Sumerian cultural orbit that it reproduced the full state apparatus of Uruk: proto-writing, cylinder seals bearing Sumerian motifs, and monumental public buildings. Susa may even have been a Sumerian colony.

  The ceramics left in the graves near the temple platform tell a precise social story. Three vessel types appear together repeatedly: a drinking goblet, a serving dish, and a small jar, suggesting that three specific foods or drinks were considered necessary for the afterlife. The more carefully painted pieces almost certainly belonged to people of higher standing; coarser cooking jars with simple painted bands accompanied humbler burials, along with the graves of adolescents and children. The pottery was made by hand, and the slight asymmetry of the vessels shows that most of the shaping was done freehand, without a wheel.

  Higher in the Zagros mountains, the kingdom of Lullubi carved what are now the earliest surviving rock reliefs in Iran, dating to around 2300 BC. Cut into cliffs in what is today Kermanshah province, these images of rulers and deities were the direct ancestors of the great Achaemenid Behistun relief, which appeared roughly fifteen hundred years later on the same mountain road.

• 3. Bronze, Iron, and the Nomadic Hand

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  Luristan bronzes, recovered in large numbers from Lorestān Province and Kermanshah in west-central Iran, belong to a world of movement. They are small, cast, and flat, with extensive openwork, the same formal strategy used in Scythian metalwork, and for the same practical reason: their makers were nomadic or semi-nomadic people who needed every possession to be light and portable.

  Produced roughly between 1000 and 650 BC, these objects covered the full range of daily and ceremonial life: weapons, horse-harness fittings, pins, cups, finials that may have topped tent-poles. Animals dominate the imagery, especially goats and sheep with dramatically large horns. A recurring motif shows a human figure grasping two confronted animals on either side, the so-called Master of Animals, here rendered in a style that is angular, compressed, and highly stylized. Some versions show a female Mistress of Animals instead.

  The Ziwiye hoard, found in Kurdistan province and dated to around 700 BC, preserves a related but distinct moment: objects mostly in metal that probably reflect the art of Persian cities of the period, giving a rare glimpse of urban production alongside the nomadic tradition. Even earlier metalwork of exceptional quality has been found at Hasanlu and Marlik, pushing the evidence for skilled Iranian metalworking back further still.

• 4. Emperors in Stone

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  Achaemenid art, produced under the empire that ruled from 550 to 330 BC, achieved something unusual: it drew artists, techniques, and styles from every corner of a vast empire and forged them into a synthesis that was recognizably new. Frieze reliefs, glazed brick masonry, monumental column capitals ending in paired animal heads, and the sweeping gardens of the Persian court all bear the mark of this achievement. The inscriptions at the treasury of Persepolis suggest that the rich goldwork of the period may have been a specialty of the Medes, but even that tradition was folded into a broader Persian idiom.

  The necropolis at Naqsh-e Rostam makes the Achaemenid sense of permanence concrete. Four royal tombs are cut high into a cliff face, each facade following the same formula: a king receives investiture from a god above a frieze of tribute-bearers, soldiers, and officials rendered in sharply differentiated sizes. Only one tomb is identified by inscription; that is the tomb of Darius I the Great, who reigned from around 522 to 486 BC. The other three are assigned by inference to Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, and Darius II. A fifth, unfinished tomb is thought most likely to belong to Darius III, the last Achaemenid ruler, who died after Alexander's conquest.

  The same cliff became a canvas for a later dynasty. The Sasanian reliefs carved below the Achaemenid tombs include one of antiquity's most striking political images: the king Shapur I on horseback, with the Roman Emperor Valerian bowing at his feet and the dead Emperor Gordian III lying beneath the horse. This image commemorates the Battle of Edessa in 260 AD, when Valerian became the only Roman Emperor ever taken prisoner of war. The Sasanians placed these carvings directly beneath Achaemenid tombs to signal an explicit claim to that legacy.

  The rock relief tradition catalogued in its standard reference lists eighty-eight known pre-Islamic examples: four Lullubi, fifteen Elamite, two Assyrian, nine Achaemenid, and thirty-five Sasanian among them. That span from roughly 2300 BC to the 7th century AD traces an almost unbroken visual argument for royal power chiseled into the Iranian landscape.

• 5. The Sasanian Court in Silver and Silk

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  In 224 AD, Ardashir I defeated the last Parthian king and founded the Sasanian dynasty, which would rule for four hundred years across modern Iran, Iraq, and territories extending as far as the Levant, parts of Anatolia, and portions of Egypt and Arabia. Its art looked back to Achaemenid precedent while absorbing influences from as far away as China and the Mediterranean.

  The most portable ambassadors of Sasanian taste were its silver vessels: large plates and bowls with embossed or engraved scenes of mounted kings, hunting, combat, and feasting, often partially gilded. Ewers for wine sometimes carried relief figures of dancing girls. These objects traveled widely; they were exported to China and westward toward Byzantium, and they embedded Sasanian visual conventions in courts thousands of miles from their origin. Sasanian glass, technically a silica-soda-lime production, achieved enough quality to appear in elite burials in Japan.

  The lost Baharestan Carpet, a royal floor covering at the palace in Ctesiphon, was praised so extravagantly by the Muslim conquerors who eventually seized it that it became a legend. The surviving Sasanian textile fragments, mostly showing animals arranged in compartments, are far humbler, probably the work of nomadic weavers, but they confirm a long-established textile tradition. The wall paintings at Panjakent in modern Tajikistan, largely dating from the 7th and 8th centuries and now mostly in the Hermitage Museum or in Tashkent, preserve the fullest surviving picture of Sasanian-era figure painting: enthroned rulers, feast scenes, battles, and illustrations of both Persian and Indian epics across the walls of palaces and private houses.

• 6. Conquest and Continuity

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  The Muslim conquest of Persia was complete by 654. The Arab conquerors gave up early attempts to impose Arabic as a spoken language, though it became the language of scholarship. Persian cultural identity survived, and so did many of the visual priorities of the Sasanian court: mounted heroes, hunting scenes, seated rulers with attendants continued to appear in pottery and metalwork, now enclosed by geometric and calligraphic decoration.

  Nishapur during the 9th and 10th centuries became one of the great centers of ceramic production in the Islamic world. Most of the ceramics recovered there are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and in museums in Tehran and Mashhad. The Samanid period in particular produced epigraphic pottery: earthenware vessels with black Kufi script painted over white slip, typically inscribed with blessings or proverbs and made at both Samarqand and Nishapur.

  The Seljuqs, nomads of Turkic origin from what is now Mongolia, seized Baghdad in 1048 and shifted the center of cultural production from Damascus and Baghdad to cities including Merv, Nishapur, Rayy, and Isfahan. Their most technically innovative contribution to ceramics was mina'i ware, painted in enamels over a white background. This is the earliest known pottery anywhere to use overglaze enamel painting; the technique reached China only slightly later, and Europe not until the 18th century. Seljuq metalworkers highlighted hammered designs with precious metal inlays, a labor-intensive technique that would be gradually displaced under the Safavids.

  The Mongol invasions of the 13th century were catastrophic in human terms but artistically generative. The Ilkhanid dynasty that ruled Iran after the conquests became patrons of large illustrated manuscripts, including the Jami' al-tawarikh compiled by Rashid-al-Din Hamadani and the Demotte Shahnameh, probably commissioned by his son. The art of the Persian book was born under their patronage, and Chinese influence became pervasive in all the arts.

• 7. The Woven Kingdom

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  Carpet weaving occupies a place in Persian culture that no other craft quite matches. Persian carpets were produced simultaneously by nomadic tribes, in village workshops, and in royal court manufactories, each line following its own conventions and reflecting its own relationship to the wider history of the land.

  The carpets woven in the Safavid court manufactories of Isfahan during the 16th century are among the most celebrated textile objects in the world, treasured in museums and private collections across the globe. Two individual Safavid carpets have become landmarks: the Ardabil Carpet, now divided between collections in London and Los Angeles, and the Coronation Carpet, now in Copenhagen. The oldest carpet with a plausible Persian origin is the Pazyryk Carpet, which predates Islam by more than a thousand years.

  The town manufactories of Tabriz, Kerman, Mashhad, Kashan, Isfahan, Nain, and Qom each developed characteristic weaving techniques, materials, and patterns. Nomadic and small village weavers produced work with bolder, sometimes coarser designs, considered by many to be the most authentically Persian carpets in the tradition, as opposed to the pre-planned artistic designs of the large urban workshops. Gabbeh rugs are the best-known type from this line.

  The craft suffered during the second half of the 19th century when synthetic dyes were introduced, displacing natural dye traditions. Recovery came through deliberate revival: the reintroduction of natural dyes and traditional tribal patterns, combined with new designs woven in centuries-old techniques. In 2010, the traditional skills of carpet weaving in Fārs and Kashan were inscribed on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists.

• 8. The Art of the Safavid Book and the Qajar Canvas

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  Shah Tahmasp I, who reigned from 1524 to 1576, funded the royal workshop that produced some of the most magnificent Persian manuscripts ever made, but from the 1540s onward he grew increasingly troubled by religious doubt. In 1556 he issued an Edict of Sincere Repentance that attempted to outlaw miniature painting, music, and other arts. The consequences rippled outward: painters including Abd al-Samad and Mir Sayyid Ali left for the Mughal court in India, where they became the founding figures of the Mughal miniature tradition. The Mughal Emperor Humayun had recruited them during his exile in 1546.

  The dispersal of the royal workshop shifted production away from large illustrated books toward individual sheets collected in albums called muraqqa, making fine work available to collectors with more modest resources. Reza Abbasi, the master of this transition, worked primarily under Shah Abbas I from 1588 to 1629. His most characteristic subjects were beautiful young men and, less frequently, women or pairs of lovers, rendered with a line of exceptional refinement.

  Persian miniature painting reached its highest development in the 15th and 16th centuries, and its representational conventions were entirely its own: important figures appear larger than lesser ones; battle scenes push figures upward to indicate recession; landscapes are almost always mountainous, with cloud formations borrowed from Chinese painting. The tradition was the dominant influence on Ottoman miniature painting in Turkey and on the Mughal miniature in the Indian subcontinent.

  The Qajar dynasty, which ruled from 1781 to 1925, brought European oil painting technique into Persian court art. Fath-Ali Shah Qajar, the second Qajar ruler, became the most-portrayed figure in the tradition, his narrow waist, long black bifurcated beard, and dark eyes repeated in paintings by artists including Mihr Ali across an enormous range of settings. The arrival of photography in the later 19th century pressed portraiture toward greater individuality. The painter Kamal-ol-molk, born in 1845, trained partly within the court tradition and partly under a painter who had studied in Europe, then traveled to Europe himself in 1898 at the age of 47, staying four years and returning to accelerate the shift toward a more European style that would define Persian painting at the close of the Qajar era.