The Representation of European Landscapes in Later Safavid Painting

From the middle of the Safavid era, with the expansion of relations with the West, European landscapes were used in various ways in the composition of paintings called “FARANGI-SAZI”. In this article, by adopting a hermeneutic approach, the epistemological context necessary for the emergence of “landscape painting” as an independent genre in European painting has been studied and then the transformation of these landscapes in late Safavid painting has been “analyzed” and “interpreted”. The findings of the article indicate that the European landscapes in the painting of that time were considered as “Paragone” as a region next to or behind the main narrative, so the landscape continues its previous role as the “background of the narrative” in the Persian Painting. This shows the continuation of the aesthetic tradition of Iranian painting in painting called FARANGI-SAZI. Despite the enthusiasm of patrons and painters for European landscapes, not many of the remained landscape paintings of this era are done by Iraninan painters. The emergence of landscape painting in post-Renaissance Europe required the establishment of a special form of the dialectic of reason and mimesis. In this dialectic, the mimetic aspect of the landscape shows the subject’s effort to compensate for the growing alienation from nature, while this moment (imitation) in Iranian painting has a narrative and conceptual direction and the “gaze” of the painter depends more on the idea of “Verbal Narrative” than on the objectivity of nature ahead.