A Comparative Study of the Image of Div in Iranian Painting Schools from the Ilkhanid Period to the End of the Qajar Era

Given its rich cultural dimension and influence over other arts, including painting, Iranian literature is one of the most distinctive contexts in the field of comparative literature. This field can explore the relationship between poetry and painting from two aspects: First, how an identical concept is manifested in both written and visual arts and, second, how written art or poetry could affect visual arts or painting. Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh is one of the cultural, mythological texts which goes beyond its initial coding system, becomes present in various epistemological and artistic realms, and affects them. One of the important themes in Iranian painting is the battle betweenDiv (Demon) and human beings. The present paper intends to investigate the form of Div in the painting schools of the Ilkhanid period to the end of the Qajar period and the reasons for differences in portraying it based on Paul Ricoeur’s theory. This study seeks to provide some answers to the following questions: 1) What are the formal characteristics and distinctive features of the image of Div in the different painting Schools between the Ilkhanid and the late Qajar periods? 2) How could the differences between the images of Div in the painting schools of the mentioned time interval be explained? The results of the study indicate that the images of Div in the paintings of this period have been drawn with animal features in the body of human beings. On the other hand, the existing differences in this regard originate initially in the metaphorical aspects of Shahnameh and then in the personal perception of painters and their understanding of the text, the artistic taste of their period and the school in which they have been trained, and the social, cultural, political, and gnostic conditions and necessities of their time. This study has been conducted following the descriptiveanalytic, comparative, and library methods.