The Visual Culture of Drawing Devils in Iranian Painting

Satan is a general term for an entity that, before human creation, has had a long history of worshiping the Lord. He was driven from God's temple by refusing to prostrate to Adam; and put his eternal enmity towards Bani Adam. Descriptions and interpretations about Satan are not limited to the celestial scriptures and include other written sources. The existence of illustration in some of these books has led to the formation of examples of Satan's image among them. In the old visual culture of Iran, Satan's images have been featured in some illustrated manuscripts. These images, which we know as painting works, represent the various images of Satan in accordance with the subject matter of the text. The present paper focuses on the recognition of the visual culture dominant in Iranian painting and its main purpose is examining the various narratives of the narrators of Satan and classifying them. The questions posed in the paper, respectively, describe the various visual narratives of the devil in painting, the various literary sources written for illustrating the images and the amount of text and image matching. By answering these questions, the image of the devils in the painting was categorized into various forms of the demons, angels, humans and hybrid being; images which are based on a wide variety of literary sources, and in addition to the effect of the text, have also benefited from the artistic taste of painters.