Sovereignty Over the Ra’āyā: Reflection of Safavid Ideology in “Man on a Composite Horse and Elephant” Paintings

The” Man on a composite horse and elephant” Paintings of Safavid belong to the world- composite paintings class that the scholars have acknowledged for emerging and abundance of them in the 16th / 10th century. Despite the attractiveness, those works faced stagnation and changing concepts over the next following years. This research on the context of the theory of reflection attempts to explain the influence of society and the dominant ideology in the art works and analysis of the content of images and its adaptation to the Safavid society, the nature and function of the identity and function of the figurative compartments in those works and their role in society and the reflection of society on them. The most important achievements of this research are determining the present and absent groups in the community which is depicted in those works, extracting the main concept from encoding images including "Integrated and centralized governance" and "king as herder of ra’āyā", adjusting those concepts with the capabilities and defects of the ruling class ideology, having a critical look at the concepts and finally presenting reasons for the stagnation of their illustrations, such as reduction of the capacity of the early dynamic ideology and the wane of metaphors such as ”king as herder of ra’āyā”.