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THE REMAKING OF IRAN: EMPIRE OF THE SENSES
By Martin Gayford
Daily Telegraph
5:15PM GMT 20 Jan 2009
UK
In his long reign four centuries ago Shah Abbas presided over a great
flowering of Persian art when his nation's power was at its height. As
the British Museum continues its celebration of the history and
culture of Iran with a show of work from the time, our writer sees
Abbas's legacy at its most beautiful in his capital, Isfahan.
The bazaar at Isfahan has not changed much since it was built in the
early 17th century. Nor, one would guess, have the wares on sale -
a rich mixture of textiles, metalwork, ceramics, spices and Iranian
sweets. One warm afternoon last October I was strolling through it with
Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, a group of museum
staff, and journalists. After a day packed with visits to mosques,
museums and monuments, MacGregor was on a mission to buy a carpet -
and there are few better places in the world to do that than the
Isfahan bazaar.
MacGregor and his museum are also embarked on a far bigger operation:
to present the history and culture of Iran to the British public. In
2005, the BM presented Forgotten Empire, a highly successful show
devoted to the ancient Persia of Cyrus and Xerxes. This spring it is
following that with another, focusing on the late 16th and early 17th
century: Shah Abbas: The Remaki ng of Iran.
In a way it will present a version - enormously more precious and rare
- of the goods on sale in the bazaar. There will be superb carpets,
textiles, elaborately worked metal, paintings, elegantly written and
profusely decorated Korans: a cornucopia, in fact, of the arts of
the nation that we used to call Persia.
During his long reign Shah Abbas presided over a flowering of Iranian
arts in a style as characteristic as that of the France of Louis
XIV. This was carried from huge projects to the most delicate and
refined of decorative work. Abbas I, sometimes known as Abbas the
Great, reigned from 1587 to 1629. He was one of the great rulers
of his age - the equal of the Ottoman Sultan, the Mogul Emperor or
the King of Spain. In his epoch, Iranian power was at its highest
point since classical times. He ruled territories stretching from the
Tigris in present day Iraq to the Indus in Pakistan, and northwards
into modern Georgia and Azerbaijan. In other words, a fair proportion
of the headlines in today's newspapers are generated by places once
governed by Shah Abbas.
Historically, Iran has always been a point of interchange between east
and west - halfway down the Silk Road from China to Venice. Abbas's
capital, Isfahan, was - and remains - a multicultural and multi-faith
city.
In New Julfa, a suburb south of Isfahan across the Zayan deh river,
there is a community of Armenian Christians. Abbas transported
thousands of them forcibly from their homes in the original town
of Julfa - then perilously close to the Ottoman frontier, now in
modern Azerbaijan. It was worth moving the Armenians to Isfahan -
and treating them with respect - because of their skills in silk
weaving and trading.
The silk trade was crucial to the prosperity of Iran.
We had visited the Armenian cathedral before moving on to the
bazaar. It is a quite extraordinary transcultural composite in
which biblical scenes in a European baroque style are, it seems,
just stuck as if in a collage on top of the richly decorated tile
work characteristic of 17th-century Isfahan.
MacGregor was fascinated by this example of art-history interfusion,
delivering an eloquent and impromptu mini-lecture on the spot.
Those mosques and palaces, many built by Shah Abbas, make Isfahan by
general acclamation one of the most beautiful cities on earth. Of the
superb Sheik Lutfallah mosque, a few minutes' walk from the bazaar,
the travel writer Robert Byron observed, 'I have never encountered
splendour of this kind before.' Not even the Doge's Palace or
Versailles, he thought, were so rich.
'Abbas was a real builder,' Sheila Voss, the curator, explains. 'In
terms of architecture he was far greater than anyone who preceded
him. The decoration of the great buildings20and monuments, with
marvellous vine scroll designs, carries over into the other arts. You
see it on the domes of the mosques, but also on book bindings and in
illuminations in manuscripts.'
Under Abbas a new style of carpet - called Polonaise - appeared,
luxuriantly floral in decoration, featuring lotus blossoms and
arabesques, and a palette of gold, peach and paler colours. The most
sumptuous examples were woven in silk and gold (two will be on show
in the exhibition).
At his court flourished one of the most talented of all Iranian
painters, Reza (c1565-1635) - known, because of his close association
with the shah, as Reza-yi Abbasi. Unlike much Islamic art, Persian
miniatures are figurative, and in Reza's case show not only a flowing
line but also a sharp observation of human character. 'His style,'
Voss says, 'reflects the way people dressed, he painted the face
of the moment. It's very modern.' In Reza's paintings we see the
people and styles of Abbas's Persia: youths like fashion plates,
opium-addicted ex-soldiers, ragged holy men.
To Iran from the east came the much-prized blue-and-white porcelain
of China, which was collected in Persia and imitated by Iranian
potters. Shah Abbas evidently suffered from the mania for acquiring
porcelain - the Germans have a word for it, Porzellankrankheit, or
'porcelain sickness' - a century befor e it afflicted Europeans such
as the Elector of Saxony (who once exchanged a regiment of dragoons
for a selection of Chinese vases).
Abbas displayed his collection in the top storey of the entrance
pavilion of his palace, known as the Ali Qapu, a short distance away
from the bazaar down the immensely impressive square or maidan that
Abbas built in Isfahan.
There you can still see vase- and bowl-shaped niches cut into an
elaborate Islamic-style vault.
In its combination of energetic self-confidence and openness to
the outside world, Shah Abbas's Iran, MacGregor believes, was like
England in the same era. 'We all know about the Elizabethan moment
of England being defined, opening to the world with a new sense of
self. It's fascinating that Iran was doing exactly the same thing at
exactly the same time.'
When Pietro della Valle, an Italian traveller, saw Shah Abbas in
1618, he was impressed by his energy: 'Whether he speak, he walk,
or simply look at you, he has constantly the appearance of great
animation and vivacity.' Sir John Malcolm,
a later British emissary to Iran, described the Shah's slightly
ostentatious style of simplicity: 'Abbas was dressed in a plain dress
of red cloth. He wore no finery about his person; his sabre alone
had a gold hilt... It was evident that the king, surrounded as he
was with wealth and grandeur, affected simplicity.'
Abb as was ostentatiously pious. He is said to have walked hundreds
of miles across the desert on a pilgrimage to the great Shia shrine
at Mashhad. But his court was not a place of austere virtue.
'I think there's more austerity now than then,' Voss says. 'Abbas
drank, he did what he wanted to do.' Thomas Herbert, a Jacobean visitor
to his court, noted disapprovingly, 'Ganymede boys in vests of gold,
rich bespangled turbans, and choice sandals, their curled hair dangling
about their shoulders, with rolling eyes and vermilion cheeks.'
Even so, Abbas was not as self-indulgent as some of the later Safavid
shahs.
'A lot of his successors were addicted to alcohol,' Voss says, 'and/or
opium. I don't think Shah Abbas himself was particularly luxury-loving.
He was too restless, too mercurial.'
Despite his many achievements, Abbas's reputation is stained by acts
of cruelty. 'He was an autocrat,' Voss thinks, 'and really wanted
control, and as he became older he became paranoid - which is why he
blinded two of his sons and had another killed. Abbas also instituted
the practice of locking up the royal princes in the palace grounds,
where they were able to ride in the gardens and converse with their
tutors but learnt little of the world.'
Those gardens were among the delights of Isfahan - and a few still
remain. Thomas Herbert recalled that from a dis tance the city
resembled a forest, 'so large, but withall so sweet and verdant that
you may call it another paradise'. But a life spent in paradisial
gardens was a bad preparation for government. So Abbas was responsible
both
for the glory and, eventually, the downfall of his dynasty, the
Safavids. He and his family were descended from a medieval warrior
and holy man, Sheikh Safi (hence the name). At the beginning of
the 16th century Ismail I, the first Safavid shah, reunited the core
territories of Iran after centuries of invasion and disintegration. He
also proclaimed himself a Shia, not Sunni, Muslim. This changed Iran
in a manner as fundamental as - and somewhat similar to - that in
which Henry VIII altered English culture when he broke with Rome.
Shah Abbas's Iran was a Shia empire sandwiched between two Sunni
super-powers, Ottoman Turkey and Mogul India. And just as it did in
the case of Elizabeth's England and Catholic Spain, the religious
difference deepened the political divisions.
Neil MacGregor thinks the parallel between Abbas's Iran and Elizabethan
England is compelling. 'Both Abbas and Elizabeth I inherited a state
that had recently changed its religious affiliation. Neither made
that change, but each of them integrates that religious transformation
into a central, core identity of the new state that they forge.'
The contacts between England and the Persia of=2 0Abbas were
surprisingly close. When in Twelfth Night Sir Toby Belch observes,
'I will not give my part of this sport for a pension of thousands to be
paid from the Sophy', he is talking about the Shah (to Elizabethans,
'the great Sophy'). Shake­speare's reference is to the gifts that
the ruler of Persia had presented a pair of adventurers, Sir Robert
and Sir Anthony Sherley, dispatched on a diplomatic mission to Persia
by the Earl of Essex. Sir Robert returned as Abbas's envoy and with
a Circassian wife, Teresia, from Abbas's Caucasian realms. Both were
painted in magnificent Persian costume by Van Dyck.
Abbas was interested in alliances with European powers. His greatest
foe was the Ottoman Empire, so on the basis of 'my enemy's enemy', it
made sense to regard Europeans as at least potential friends. Later
in his reign he made common cause with the East India Company to
eject the Portuguese from the island of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.
Since then relations between the two countries have often been
fraught - and are especially so at the moment. None the less, the
show itself is proof of the close links between the British Museum
and Iran. 'Exhibitions like this are possible,' MacGregor emphasises,
'only because of long friendly relations between the curators. One
of the striking things about working with Iran is how well those
friendships h ave flourished over the past 20 years, absolutely
irrespective of whatever is going on politically.'
Though the Safavids' power crumbled within a century of the death of
Abbas, the nation he regenerated has survived. 'Most recent discussion
of Iran,' MacGregor thinks, 'has focused on the Islamic revolution
of 1979.
That has obscured the fact that this is a very old and stable
state. The leadership has changed, but the modern Iranian state is
still essentially the state that was conceived and shaped by Shah
Abbas.'
One may abhor the policies and statements of the current Iranian
government; one may find its nuclear facilities sinister and
menacing. But that just makes it all the more crucial for us to
understand Iran - an ancient and complex culture that contains,
as Abbas himself did, many contradictions.
'Shah Abbas: The Remaking of Iran', in association with the Iran
Heritage Foundation, is at the British Museum, London, from February
19 to June 14 (020-7323 8000; britishmuseum.org)
--Boundary_(ID_O9HMU4OqtVOp1QL appwlUw)--
By Martin Gayford
Daily Telegraph
5:15PM GMT 20 Jan 2009
UK
In his long reign four centuries ago Shah Abbas presided over a great
flowering of Persian art when his nation's power was at its height. As
the British Museum continues its celebration of the history and
culture of Iran with a show of work from the time, our writer sees
Abbas's legacy at its most beautiful in his capital, Isfahan.
The bazaar at Isfahan has not changed much since it was built in the
early 17th century. Nor, one would guess, have the wares on sale -
a rich mixture of textiles, metalwork, ceramics, spices and Iranian
sweets. One warm afternoon last October I was strolling through it with
Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, a group of museum
staff, and journalists. After a day packed with visits to mosques,
museums and monuments, MacGregor was on a mission to buy a carpet -
and there are few better places in the world to do that than the
Isfahan bazaar.
MacGregor and his museum are also embarked on a far bigger operation:
to present the history and culture of Iran to the British public. In
2005, the BM presented Forgotten Empire, a highly successful show
devoted to the ancient Persia of Cyrus and Xerxes. This spring it is
following that with another, focusing on the late 16th and early 17th
century: Shah Abbas: The Remaki ng of Iran.
In a way it will present a version - enormously more precious and rare
- of the goods on sale in the bazaar. There will be superb carpets,
textiles, elaborately worked metal, paintings, elegantly written and
profusely decorated Korans: a cornucopia, in fact, of the arts of
the nation that we used to call Persia.
During his long reign Shah Abbas presided over a flowering of Iranian
arts in a style as characteristic as that of the France of Louis
XIV. This was carried from huge projects to the most delicate and
refined of decorative work. Abbas I, sometimes known as Abbas the
Great, reigned from 1587 to 1629. He was one of the great rulers
of his age - the equal of the Ottoman Sultan, the Mogul Emperor or
the King of Spain. In his epoch, Iranian power was at its highest
point since classical times. He ruled territories stretching from the
Tigris in present day Iraq to the Indus in Pakistan, and northwards
into modern Georgia and Azerbaijan. In other words, a fair proportion
of the headlines in today's newspapers are generated by places once
governed by Shah Abbas.
Historically, Iran has always been a point of interchange between east
and west - halfway down the Silk Road from China to Venice. Abbas's
capital, Isfahan, was - and remains - a multicultural and multi-faith
city.
In New Julfa, a suburb south of Isfahan across the Zayan deh river,
there is a community of Armenian Christians. Abbas transported
thousands of them forcibly from their homes in the original town
of Julfa - then perilously close to the Ottoman frontier, now in
modern Azerbaijan. It was worth moving the Armenians to Isfahan -
and treating them with respect - because of their skills in silk
weaving and trading.
The silk trade was crucial to the prosperity of Iran.
We had visited the Armenian cathedral before moving on to the
bazaar. It is a quite extraordinary transcultural composite in
which biblical scenes in a European baroque style are, it seems,
just stuck as if in a collage on top of the richly decorated tile
work characteristic of 17th-century Isfahan.
MacGregor was fascinated by this example of art-history interfusion,
delivering an eloquent and impromptu mini-lecture on the spot.
Those mosques and palaces, many built by Shah Abbas, make Isfahan by
general acclamation one of the most beautiful cities on earth. Of the
superb Sheik Lutfallah mosque, a few minutes' walk from the bazaar,
the travel writer Robert Byron observed, 'I have never encountered
splendour of this kind before.' Not even the Doge's Palace or
Versailles, he thought, were so rich.
'Abbas was a real builder,' Sheila Voss, the curator, explains. 'In
terms of architecture he was far greater than anyone who preceded
him. The decoration of the great buildings20and monuments, with
marvellous vine scroll designs, carries over into the other arts. You
see it on the domes of the mosques, but also on book bindings and in
illuminations in manuscripts.'
Under Abbas a new style of carpet - called Polonaise - appeared,
luxuriantly floral in decoration, featuring lotus blossoms and
arabesques, and a palette of gold, peach and paler colours. The most
sumptuous examples were woven in silk and gold (two will be on show
in the exhibition).
At his court flourished one of the most talented of all Iranian
painters, Reza (c1565-1635) - known, because of his close association
with the shah, as Reza-yi Abbasi. Unlike much Islamic art, Persian
miniatures are figurative, and in Reza's case show not only a flowing
line but also a sharp observation of human character. 'His style,'
Voss says, 'reflects the way people dressed, he painted the face
of the moment. It's very modern.' In Reza's paintings we see the
people and styles of Abbas's Persia: youths like fashion plates,
opium-addicted ex-soldiers, ragged holy men.
To Iran from the east came the much-prized blue-and-white porcelain
of China, which was collected in Persia and imitated by Iranian
potters. Shah Abbas evidently suffered from the mania for acquiring
porcelain - the Germans have a word for it, Porzellankrankheit, or
'porcelain sickness' - a century befor e it afflicted Europeans such
as the Elector of Saxony (who once exchanged a regiment of dragoons
for a selection of Chinese vases).
Abbas displayed his collection in the top storey of the entrance
pavilion of his palace, known as the Ali Qapu, a short distance away
from the bazaar down the immensely impressive square or maidan that
Abbas built in Isfahan.
There you can still see vase- and bowl-shaped niches cut into an
elaborate Islamic-style vault.
In its combination of energetic self-confidence and openness to
the outside world, Shah Abbas's Iran, MacGregor believes, was like
England in the same era. 'We all know about the Elizabethan moment
of England being defined, opening to the world with a new sense of
self. It's fascinating that Iran was doing exactly the same thing at
exactly the same time.'
When Pietro della Valle, an Italian traveller, saw Shah Abbas in
1618, he was impressed by his energy: 'Whether he speak, he walk,
or simply look at you, he has constantly the appearance of great
animation and vivacity.' Sir John Malcolm,
a later British emissary to Iran, described the Shah's slightly
ostentatious style of simplicity: 'Abbas was dressed in a plain dress
of red cloth. He wore no finery about his person; his sabre alone
had a gold hilt... It was evident that the king, surrounded as he
was with wealth and grandeur, affected simplicity.'
Abb as was ostentatiously pious. He is said to have walked hundreds
of miles across the desert on a pilgrimage to the great Shia shrine
at Mashhad. But his court was not a place of austere virtue.
'I think there's more austerity now than then,' Voss says. 'Abbas
drank, he did what he wanted to do.' Thomas Herbert, a Jacobean visitor
to his court, noted disapprovingly, 'Ganymede boys in vests of gold,
rich bespangled turbans, and choice sandals, their curled hair dangling
about their shoulders, with rolling eyes and vermilion cheeks.'
Even so, Abbas was not as self-indulgent as some of the later Safavid
shahs.
'A lot of his successors were addicted to alcohol,' Voss says, 'and/or
opium. I don't think Shah Abbas himself was particularly luxury-loving.
He was too restless, too mercurial.'
Despite his many achievements, Abbas's reputation is stained by acts
of cruelty. 'He was an autocrat,' Voss thinks, 'and really wanted
control, and as he became older he became paranoid - which is why he
blinded two of his sons and had another killed. Abbas also instituted
the practice of locking up the royal princes in the palace grounds,
where they were able to ride in the gardens and converse with their
tutors but learnt little of the world.'
Those gardens were among the delights of Isfahan - and a few still
remain. Thomas Herbert recalled that from a dis tance the city
resembled a forest, 'so large, but withall so sweet and verdant that
you may call it another paradise'. But a life spent in paradisial
gardens was a bad preparation for government. So Abbas was responsible
both
for the glory and, eventually, the downfall of his dynasty, the
Safavids. He and his family were descended from a medieval warrior
and holy man, Sheikh Safi (hence the name). At the beginning of
the 16th century Ismail I, the first Safavid shah, reunited the core
territories of Iran after centuries of invasion and disintegration. He
also proclaimed himself a Shia, not Sunni, Muslim. This changed Iran
in a manner as fundamental as - and somewhat similar to - that in
which Henry VIII altered English culture when he broke with Rome.
Shah Abbas's Iran was a Shia empire sandwiched between two Sunni
super-powers, Ottoman Turkey and Mogul India. And just as it did in
the case of Elizabeth's England and Catholic Spain, the religious
difference deepened the political divisions.
Neil MacGregor thinks the parallel between Abbas's Iran and Elizabethan
England is compelling. 'Both Abbas and Elizabeth I inherited a state
that had recently changed its religious affiliation. Neither made
that change, but each of them integrates that religious transformation
into a central, core identity of the new state that they forge.'
The contacts between England and the Persia of=2 0Abbas were
surprisingly close. When in Twelfth Night Sir Toby Belch observes,
'I will not give my part of this sport for a pension of thousands to be
paid from the Sophy', he is talking about the Shah (to Elizabethans,
'the great Sophy'). Shake­speare's reference is to the gifts that
the ruler of Persia had presented a pair of adventurers, Sir Robert
and Sir Anthony Sherley, dispatched on a diplomatic mission to Persia
by the Earl of Essex. Sir Robert returned as Abbas's envoy and with
a Circassian wife, Teresia, from Abbas's Caucasian realms. Both were
painted in magnificent Persian costume by Van Dyck.
Abbas was interested in alliances with European powers. His greatest
foe was the Ottoman Empire, so on the basis of 'my enemy's enemy', it
made sense to regard Europeans as at least potential friends. Later
in his reign he made common cause with the East India Company to
eject the Portuguese from the island of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.
Since then relations between the two countries have often been
fraught - and are especially so at the moment. None the less, the
show itself is proof of the close links between the British Museum
and Iran. 'Exhibitions like this are possible,' MacGregor emphasises,
'only because of long friendly relations between the curators. One
of the striking things about working with Iran is how well those
friendships h ave flourished over the past 20 years, absolutely
irrespective of whatever is going on politically.'
Though the Safavids' power crumbled within a century of the death of
Abbas, the nation he regenerated has survived. 'Most recent discussion
of Iran,' MacGregor thinks, 'has focused on the Islamic revolution
of 1979.
That has obscured the fact that this is a very old and stable
state. The leadership has changed, but the modern Iranian state is
still essentially the state that was conceived and shaped by Shah
Abbas.'
One may abhor the policies and statements of the current Iranian
government; one may find its nuclear facilities sinister and
menacing. But that just makes it all the more crucial for us to
understand Iran - an ancient and complex culture that contains,
as Abbas himself did, many contradictions.
'Shah Abbas: The Remaking of Iran', in association with the Iran
Heritage Foundation, is at the British Museum, London, from February
19 to June 14 (020-7323 8000; britishmuseum.org)
--Boundary_(ID_O9HMU4OqtVOp1QL appwlUw)--