Persian Art and Architecture: From Persepolis to Isfahan
I have stood, more than once, in front of the Achaemenid reliefs in the National Museum of Iran in Tehran, and the first thing that always strikes me is how small they are. The Apadana staircase at Persepolis looks, in a museum vitrine, like a sequence of polite illustrations. Stand on the actual terrace at Persepolis — I went in the spring of 2018, off-season, with the Marvdasht plain spread out below and the wind coming off the Kuh-e Rahmat — and the reliefs transform. They are not illustrations. They are the political theory of a multi-ethnic empire, carved in stone, and they are still legible. Margaret Cool Root, in The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art (1979), read the same reliefs and said so in print. The terrace is the better teacher.
This pillar is written from that perspective — that of someone who has spent time looking at the objects, not just reading about them. The visual culture of the Iranian plateau is the most underrated continuous tradition of the pre-modern world, in part because the literature on it is divided among curators, archaeologists, art historians, and Islamicists who do not always read each other. The museum collections in London, Paris, Tehran, New York, Berlin, and St Petersburg hold the bulk of the material, and the British Museum’s Forgotten Empire exhibition of 2005 (Curtis and Tallis, eds.) was the first serious attempt in a generation to put Achaemenid art before a general audience. It worked.
Three modern works remain the indispensable multi-volume references. Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman’s Survey of Persian Art, published in six volumes between 1938 and 1939 (with later supplementary volumes), was the first comprehensive attempt to catalogue the tradition. André Godard’s L’Art de l’Iran (1962) is the principal French synthesis. The Cambridge History of Iran volumes VI and VII (Yarshater, 1986 and 1991) cover the Sasanian and Islamic periods. For specific periods, Root on Achaemenid art, D. T. Potts on Sasanian Mesopotamia, and Oleg Grabar and Sheila Blair on Islamic art are the indispensable works of reference in their respective fields. The principal museum collections, with their respective catalogue strengths, are the British Museum (Achaemenid, Oxus Treasure), the Louvre (Sasanian silver), the National Museum of Iran (Persepolis, Susa, Sasanian seals), the Metropolitan Museum (Sasanian silver, Islamic textiles), the V&A (Safavid carpets), the Hermitage (Sasanian silver, Central Asian Sasanian), and the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin (lustre ware, inlaid metalwork).
The geography of materials
The Iranian Plateau — bounded by the Zagros to the west, the Hindu Kush to the east, the Caspian to the north, and the Persian Gulf to the south — produced a distinctive visual vocabulary from the start. Its geology, with abundant stone in the west, brick-clay in the central plateau, and timber in the Caspian forests, dictated the materials of monumental building. Its climate, hot and dry in the south and cold and snowy in the mountains, demanded responses in domestic architecture: thick walls, deep porches, the badgir tower, and underground qanats that cooled palaces and fed gardens. The plateau’s position at the crossroads of Eurasia made it, from the beginning, a meeting point of artistic traditions. Elamite Susa, Median Ecbatana, Achaemenid Persepolis, Parthian Hatra and Ctesiphon, and Sasanian Bishapur each became laboratories in which the visual idioms of Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean, India, and the steppe were combined with native Iranian sensibilities.
Achaemenid: the great synthesis
The first great flowering of Persian monumental art was the Achaemenid period, and its centrepiece was Persepolis, the ceremonial capital founded by Darius the Great and extended by his successors. Persepolis was not a city in the ordinary sense but a ritual complex of hypostyle halls, columned porticoes, royal residences, and storerooms, set on a vast terrace of dressed stone overlooking the Marvdasht plain. Its buildings — the Apadana of Darius, the Throne Hall of Xerxes I, the Hadish of Xerxes, and the Tachara of Darius — were conceived as settings for the Nowruz festival, when delegations from across the empire brought tribute to the King of Kings.
The architecture of Persepolis combined elements from across the empire. The tall, fluted columns with double-volute capitals, sometimes reaching 20 metres in height, recalled Egyptian and Phoenician models but were rendered in a distinctively Persian idiom. The palace platforms, raised on sculptured walls, were an inheritance from Mesopotamian tradition. The audience halls, supported by forests of columns, were an Iranian innovation that would influence palatial architecture from India to Byzantium. The decorative programme — the long processional reliefs of the Apadana staircase — depicted twenty-three delegations of tribute-bearers from every satrapy: Medes, Elamites, Parthians, Bactrians, Indians, Egyptians, Ethiopians, Greeks, Lydians, Babylonians, each rendered with ethnographic accuracy and formal dignity. The reliefs are, among other things, a visual census of the Achaemenid world. If you want to know what the Achaemenids thought their empire looked like, the Apadana is the answer.
Pasargadae, the earlier capital built by Cyrus the Great in the Murghab plain, expressed a different architectural language. Its palaces, set in a parkland of cypresses and watercourses, were simpler and more open than those of Persepolis. The famous tomb of Cyrus, a small gabled stone chamber on a six-stepped platform, became the prototype for the dynastic mausoleum in Iran. The gardens of Pasargadae, with their four-fold geometry, are the earliest securely attested example of the chahar bagh, the four-part garden that would become a hallmark of Persian landscape design and a powerful metaphor in Persian poetry and religion.
Beyond Persepolis and Pasargadae, the Achaemenid empire produced a striking body of smaller works. Gold and silver drinking vessels, in the form of rhyta ending in animal heads, were produced in royal workshops and distributed as gifts to satraps and foreign kings. The Oxus Treasure, a hoard of gold and silver objects found in Tajikistan and now divided among the British Museum (where the vakhsh armlets and the model chariot are the most photographed pieces), the V&A, and other collections, includes bracelets, armlets, a model chariot, and votive plaques that show the Achaemenid taste for composite creatures, lotus and palmette ornament, and the disciplined symmetry the Persians would make their signature. The British Museum catalogue numbers for the principal pieces run from 123,923 to 124,080; a specialist will recognise a few by heart.
Parthian: the hybrid idiom
The Parthian period has sometimes been dismissed, in older scholarship, as a Hellenistic interlude in which Greek forms dominated and native Iranian traditions withered. Modern archaeology has corrected that view. The Parthian Empire sustained a vigorous and distinctive art that combined Greek, Iranian, and Central Asian elements in a deliberately hybrid idiom. The Parthian-era reliefs added to the cliff of Behistun, by various Parthian kings including Mithridates II and Gotarzes II, continued the Achaemenid tradition of imperial imagery. The palace architecture of Hatra, an Arabian Parthian client state in northern Mesopotamia, mixed Greek colonnades, Mesopotamian vaulting, and local decoration in a manner that was distinctly Parthian in its refusal of single-source imitation.
The most accessible body of Parthian art is its coinage. The drachms of the Arsacid kings, struck at mints across the empire, depict the ruler in profile on the obverse, often wearing the distinctive Parthian tiara, and an archer seated on a throne or on horseback on the reverse. The seated archer type, introduced in the late second century BCE, was a political statement: a claim to Iranian kingship, to Achaemenid legitimacy, and to a martial identity. The style of the portrait, increasingly frontal and abstract over the centuries, marks a movement away from Hellenistic naturalism toward the sharper, more iconic conventions that would dominate Sasanian art.
In the round, Parthian terracotta figurines, found in great numbers at sites like Nippur, Seleucia-on-the-Tigris, and Babylon, depicted horsemen, musicians, draped women, and grotesque actors with verve. The figures, often moulded rather than carved, record a world of caravan cities, courts, and markets in which Greek dress, Iranian robes, and Parthian trousers all jostled for attention. The Parthian period is the only one of the three empires where the small object has more to say than the monumental one.
Sasanian: the high style
The Sasanian period is, by most accounts, the high point of pre-Islamic Persian art, though the Achaemenid achievement is comparable and the Timurid and Safavid traditions are the longest. The dynasty, founded by Ardashir I and reaching its zenith under Khosrow I Anushirvan, produced an art that was at once deeply Iranian, ferociously Zoroastrian, and open to influences from Rome, Central Asia, India, and China. Matthew Canepa’s The Two Eyes of the Earth: Art and Ritual of Kingship between Rome and Sasanian Iran (2009) has shown the depth of the Sasanian-Roman visual conversation; Canepa is good on the iconography and is honest about the limits of what we can claim about transmission.
The Sasanian rock reliefs — cut into the cliffs of Naqsh-e Rostam, Naqsh-e Rajab, Bishapur, Firuzabad, Taq-e Bostan, and many other sites — are the most visible monuments of the period. The triumph relief at Naqsh-e Rajab, in which Shapur I sits on horseback over the captured Roman emperor Valerian, and the related investiture relief of Shapur I by Ahura Mazda at the Ka’ba-ye Zartosht at Naqsh-e Rostam, set the iconographic template for royal imagery in the region for centuries. (The two are separate compositions; the conflation of the triumph and the investiture is a common error in older literature.) Other reliefs commemorate the foundation of the dynasty by Ardashir, the victories of Shapur over the Romans, the investiture of Khosrow II, and the boar hunt of the last great Sasanian king. The hunting scenes, in which the mounted king pierces a lion or a wild boar with a single spear, were copied as far as the mosaic floors of Roman villas, the silk textiles of Tang China, and the carvings of Mughal India.
Sasanian silver plate, much of it produced for export to Rome and the steppe, is among the finest work of late antique metalwork. Drinking bowls and ewers carry elaborate scenes of royal hunting, banquets, dancing girls, and processions of tribute-bearers. The iconography of the king as hunter, the banquet under a canopy, the woman at the foot of the throne, and the divine investiture would be imitated, with variations, by Byzantine, Islamic, and Western medieval craftsmen for a thousand years. Major collections of Sasanian silver are in the Hermitage (the Anikova plate, the Oxus-related hoards), the Metropolitan, the British Museum, and the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris. The Cabinet des Médailles plate known as the “Ewer of Shapur” (Cabinet des Médailles, Département des Monnaies, Médailles et Antiques, BnF) is the single most reproduced Sasanian object in modern scholarship.
Sasanian silk, woven in the royal workshops of Rayy, Bishapur, and Merv, was closely regulated by the imperial court: the great hunting and roundel designs, the senmurv (a composite canine-bird creature), the pearl roundel enclosing a confronted pair of animals, were exported to Byzantium, the steppe peoples of Central Asia, and the courts of Tang China, where they shaped the vocabulary of Chinese textile design. The famous silkworm-smuggling episode of c. 552 CE (Procopius, Wars 8.17) is a sign that the regulation was porous. Sasanian silk is the only pre-modern commodity whose iconographic influence on later European and Chinese design is now reasonably well documented, mostly thanks to the work of Judith Lerner and the recent surveys of Sasanian textiles by the Louvre and the V&A.
The Islamic centuries
The Arab conquest of the Sasanian Empire in 651 did not interrupt the Persian artistic tradition. It opened it to a wider world. Under the caliphate, Persian craftsmen, builders, and designers found new patrons in Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, and Córdoba. The Samarra ware of the Abbasid period, with its incised and lustre decoration, was a product of Persian potters working in Iraq. The wall paintings of Qusayr ʿAmra in the Jordanian desert, often attributed to Umayyad princes, follow Sasanian iconographic models. The Samanid mausoleum at Bukhara (c. 905), with its pointed dome and brick patterning, is a direct descendant of Sasanian construction.
Under the Seljuks, who ruled Iran, Iraq, and much of Central Asia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Persian art entered a new phase. The great congregational mosque of Isfahan, the Masjid-i Jamiʿ, was rebuilt in monumental form with four iwans, domes, and brick minarets. The Persian carpet, which had been a Sasanian luxury and an Islamic courtly product, became, under the Seljuks, a major export; fragments from this period, the so-called Saljuq carpets, survive in European church treasuries. Persian pottery, with its minaʾi (enamel-decorated) and haft-rang (seven-colour) wares, reached an extraordinary technical refinement; the minaʾi tiles of the late twelfth century were the direct ancestors of Persian miniature painting.
The Mongol invasions, which devastated Iran in the thirteenth century, paradoxically enriched Persian art by connecting it more directly to Chinese models. The Ilkhanid court at Tabriz became a meeting point of Chinese, Central Asian, and Iranian traditions, and the great Shahnameh manuscripts of the period, the Demotte (or Great Mongol) Shahnameh of the Ilkhanid period, are the earliest fully developed examples of Persian book painting. The Ilkhanid tradition, transmitted through painters like Ahmad Musa and his students, became the foundation of the Timurid and Safavid schools.
The Timurid dynasty of the fifteenth century, with its capital at Herat, was the great age of Persian book arts. The Shahnameh of Shah Rukh (c. 1430), the Khamsa of Nizami executed for Sultan Baysunghur, and the manuscripts produced for Baysunghur’s son Ala al-Dawla are the touchstones of the tradition. The Baysunghur script, the delicate floral borders, the lapis-and-gold palette, and the integration of painting with calligraphy became the hallmarks of the Persian book.
The Safavid dynasty (1501–1736), with its capitals at Tabriz, Qazvin, and finally Isfahan, turned Iran into a major Shiʿi power and made Persian art a central element of imperial ideology. Shah ʿAbbas I moved the capital to Isfahan in 1598 and rebuilt the city as a showcase of Safavid power. The great Naqsh-e Jahan Square, the Masjed-e Shah, the Sheikh Lotfollah mosque, and the Ali Qapu palace were decorated with an extraordinary programme of haft-rang tilework, calligraphy, and stone-cut muqarnas that became the model for Persian religious and secular architecture. The carpets of Safavid Isfahan, Kashan, Kerman, and Tabriz, with their elaborate medallion-and-corner designs, silk-and-metal brocades, and vegetable-dye palettes, were exported in great numbers to Europe, where they appear in the paintings of Holbein, Lotto, and Vermeer. The Ardabil Carpet in the V&A (carpet no. 272-1898) and the Medallion Carpet in the Metropolitan (no. 22.100) are the two pieces any Safavid specialist must see in person, and the 2010 conservation treatment of the Ardabil Carpet at the V&A — taking it from its previous burgundy field to its current soft blue — is one of the more controversial restoration decisions of recent decades.
The grammar of buildings
Persian architecture is an architecture of climate, materials, and geometry. Its recurring elements — the iwan, the chahar taq, the chahar bagh, the dome on squinches, the pointed brick arch, the muqarnas, the tile-faced surface — are the products of a long tradition of building in mud brick, fired brick, and stone in a region where summer heat, winter cold, and seismic instability demanded flexibility and lightness. The four-iwan plan, in which a building is organised around a central courtyard with monumental vaulted halls opening on each of the four cardinal sides, is the single architectural type from which more of the Islamic east was built than any other. It originated in the Sasanian palace, was adopted by the early Islamic builders of the Iranian world, became the standard plan of the Persian congregational mosque, and was carried by the Timurids to India, where it produced the great mosques of the Mughals, including the Masjid-i Jahan-Numa of Delhi. The architecture of the Persian world is thus the ancestor of an entire family of monumental buildings across the Islamic east.
The carpet tradition
The Persian carpet is, with the possible exception of poetry, the most widely recognised of all Persian art forms. The technique of pile-knotting is of great antiquity on the Iranian plateau, and the famous Pazyryk carpet, preserved in a Scythian tomb in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia and dating to the fifth or fourth century BCE, is the oldest surviving pile carpet in the world. Its design, with horsemen, deer, and griffins arranged in formal rows, demonstrates that the Persian knotted carpet was already, by the Achaemenid period, a technically mature art form. The tradition of carpet weaving was never interrupted in Iran. The Sasanian Spring of Khosrow is a literary topos, attested in Arabic and Persian sources, not a surviving object.
Painting and the book
The Persian book is one of the supreme achievements of medieval Islamic art. Bound between stamped and tooled leather covers, written in elegant nastaʿliq or naskh script, and illuminated with gold and lapis, the great Persian manuscripts combined calligraphy, painting, illustration, illumination, and binding into a single art form. The Persian miniature painting tradition developed in the workshops of Herat, Tabriz, Shiraz, and Isfahan into a sophisticated art of line, colour, and composition. The Persian miniatures of the Ilkhanid, Jalayirid, Timurid, and Safavid periods are characterised by their high horizon, jewel-like colour, intricate geometric pattern, and a unique blend of naturalism and stylisation. They influenced Mughal India, Ottoman Turkey, and, by a complex chain of transmission, even the development of European book illustration in the early modern period.
Rock-cut monuments and the royal tomb
The Achaemenid and Sasanian dynasties left some of the most dramatic rock-cut monuments of the ancient world. The four royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam, carved high on a cliff face in Fars, are the burial places of Darius the Great, Xerxes I, Artaxerxes I, and Darius II. Their facades, with their columned porticoes, royal figures on the platform, and recumbent lion above the entrance, are the most distinctive architectural form of the Achaemenid period. Nearby, the Kaʿba-ye Zartosht, a square stone tower that may have housed the sacred fire of Zoroastrianism, and the great Sasanian rock reliefs of the investiture, the triumph, and the hunt, transform the site into a continuous gallery of Persian imperial art spanning more than a thousand years.
The Pahlavi and modern period
The Pahlavi dynasty (1925–1979), the last royal house of Iran, marked a deliberate attempt to connect modern Iran to its pre-Islamic past. Reza Shah and his son Mohammad Reza Shah patronised a major programme of restoration and excavation, including the resumption of work at Persepolis under the archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld and, later, Erich Schmidt. The reconstructed Hadish of Xerxes, the stone columns of the Apadana, and the Tachara of Darius at Persepolis are products of this period, as is the National Museum of Iran, founded in 1937 and now the largest archaeological museum in West Asia. The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, founded in 1977, houses a major collection of twentieth-century Western and Iranian art and is, by floor space, the largest contemporary art museum in West Asia. The 1979 Islamic Revolution brought a major shift in the cultural politics of Iran, with a partial retreat from figural art and a renewed emphasis on calligraphy, geometric pattern, and the traditional crafts.
Decorative and applied arts
The decorative arts of the Persian world, including metalwork, ceramics, glass, and jade, are among the most refined of any tradition. The Achaemenid gold and silver vessels, with their composite animal terminals, lotus ornament, and rosette patterns, established a vocabulary that was developed by the Parthian, Sasanian, and Islamic craftsmen. The Islamic period saw a continued refinement: the Samawal ware of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with its inlaid silver and copper decoration on a bronze body, is a high point of medieval Islamic metalwork, and the Safavid metalwork of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with its inlaid gold and silver and intricate engraved patterns, was exported across Eurasia.
Persian ceramics, in particular the pottery of the Seljuk and Ilkhanid periods, are among the most distinctive of all medieval Islamic decorative arts. The minaʾi ware of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, with its enamel-decorated surfaces depicting courtly figures, animals, and floral patterns, is the most famous of the Seljuk wares. The lustre ware of Kashan in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, with its metallic iridescent decoration, was exported across the Islamic world and is the ancestor of the lustre ware of medieval Italy and Renaissance Spain. The Safavid tilework of the seventeenth century, with its haft-rang mosaic faience, set the standard for architectural decoration across the Islamic east.
The glass of the Sasanian and Islamic periods is among the finest in the pre-modern world. The Sasanian glass industry, centred on the cities of Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau, produced cut glass, mould-blown glass, and free-blown glass of considerable refinement. The Islamic glass industry of the medieval period, centred on Samarra, Raqqa, Aleppo, and Damascus, produced work of extraordinary technical sophistication, and the Corning Museum of Glass in New York holds one of the larger Western collections of Islamic-period Persian glass.