The Effect of Social and Cultural Evolutions in Safavid and Qajar Dynasties on Women's Portraiture and Iconography

In the Safavid and Qajar dynasties, due to the relationship of Iran with the West, the desire of the court to experience the modern world and the desire of the Western world to recognize the East, shaped a kind of traditional and modern dichotomy in many social, cultural and artistic relationships of the society. This also influenced the status of women and their presence in the social arena. The portraiture in Iranian painting has been based on a pattern. What has been studied in this research is the woman's face in the paintings of these two periods. This article seeks to answer the following questions: How was the presentation of women's features in the designs of the Safavid period and Qajar era? What differences did they have in these two periods? The research method is descriptive-analytic and the information gathered by library method. The results show that women in the works of pre-Qajar paintings often have an exemplary and mythical position and, in terms of design, were unrealistic, and its visual value was like other elements of the painting, but in the late Safavid period and the Qajar period there has been a change in attitude towards painting due to the relationship with the West. As a result of attention to realism in drawing women's figures, as well as the formation of monotonous works, this led to a new image of woman in Iranian painting.