Investigate the realistic status of the Timurid era’s tiling decorations in Herat school’s painting (with a thematic approach to the Behzad’s paintings)

The studies conducted so far on the Herat school’s painting were more related to the aesthetic aspects and paid rarely attention to them in realistic perspective. One of the realistic features in paintings of the school was the reflection of Islamic architecture and decorative elements attached to it. Little attention to investigate the decorative elements in paintings stems from this presumption that Iran’s painting mostly shows the world of Ideas and is far from the visible reality. In this paper, it is attempted to investigate the realism of tiling decorations of the Behzad’s paintings by removing the existing presumption. The present study seeks to answer the question that what extent is the status of using the motifs and tiling decorations in Behzad’s paintings and their adapting to decorative motifs of its contemporary architectural monuments’ tiling? The research method is descriptive and analytical based on library data. For this purpose, 8 Behzad’s paintings were selected and their tiling decorations have been analyzed. Then, the comparative comparison was performed among each type of the decorations identified with the same decorations in established monuments of the Timurid era. Results indicate that most tiling decorations of paintings are affected by the real monuments of the Timurid era in terms of form, structure and color, and the common types of decoration used in paintings are under glazed tiles, geometric faience mosaic, geometric monochrome and then brick’s Girihchini and painted tile through matching the decorative motifs and the accuracy of structure, while some other common types of the Timurid era’s tiling such as geometrical under glazed, mosaic floral, geometric Moaqely and masonry ones have not been used in Behzad’s paintings.