Artistic Expression in Persian Paintings of the Leili and Majnoon Story in Shah Tahmasp's Quintet Manuscript

Due to the combination of mystical and ethical teachings, with tales and artistic stories, Iranian literature has been the source of inspiration for Iranian painters during different periods. The development of painting in the field of literature has given fruitful results in the form of illustrated versions, which even today no equal can be found for them. A major contribution to the creation of beautiful and imaginative Persian painting has been influenced by the wise lyrics of the great poets such as Ferdowsi, Saadi and Nizami. Nizami is one of the poets who should be considered as one of the pioneers of Persian literature and of the indisputable masters of this language. Although storytelling in Farsi was not initiated by Nizami, but the only poet, who by the end of the sixth century had managed to develop an allegorical poem to the point of evolution, is Nizami. Among the literary works, Nizami’s quintet has got a special reception among the painters because of the selection of beautiful stories, pictorial and believable accounts with accurate scenes and image descriptions. Each of the treasures of quintet has been illustrated many times by the painters, and this has continued as a long tradition, and today it has remained in the form of precious treasures. One of the most beautiful examples of Nizami’s quintet in the time of the Safavid Shah Tahmasb, which has been illustrated in Tabriz by the famous artists of that era and is known as Khamseh Tahmasbi, is now kept at the Library of the British Museum in London. Today only 14 paintings of the works of the Tabriz school in this manuscript have remained, but this small number well reflects the refined features of the Tabriz school during the Safavid period.   In Leili and Majnoon, the third episode of this edition, there are two epitaphs related to Aqa Mirak and Mir seyyed Ali who are among the most celebrated masters of the Safavid era, which form the subject of this paper. In these two works titled "Majnoon in desert" and "Bringing up Majnoon to the Leili’s Tent", in addition to describing Nizami’s stories in the language of the image, the influence of the artist's viewpoint on the image of each story is also evident. In this article, firstly, we briefly discuss the Leili and Majnoon story in quintet of Nizami, then explain the characteristics of the two abovementioned images and the effect of the literary text on the creation of images as well as the visual characteristics of each image and the relationship between form and space in the works. At first, a brief description of the story of each image is presented, and then the description of the space of each work is offered by referring to written sources and images, and finally, the visual structure of the images and the features of each work are mentioned. The main issue in this research is the recognition of the quality of artistic expression in these two works and the paper seeks to answer the questions posed below: What signs and symbols were used by the painters to express the theme of the illustrated story in order to create an ideal artistic expression? How the compositions, visual elements and forces and the relationship between visual elements of each image could serve to create artistic expression? There are numerous references to the internal and external sources of literature in the case of the features of the Safavid Tabriz school and the images of Khamseh Tahmasbi; among which “Persian Painting” written by Basil Gray, “Iran Painting from Late to Today” by Rouein Pakbaz, the two volumes of the book of “Islamic Painting” as well as “Tabriz, Qazvin and Mashhad Schools” both of which are written by Yaqoub Adjand, also Eleanor Sims' book “Peerless Images” can be cited. Also about these two paintings and their artists some contents have been written in books such as the book of “Twelve Faces” and the writing of Sheila,R Canby, some of which have been used in this paper, but the objective of this paper has been to focus on how to articulate artistic expressions using the visual factors and symbols in these two pictures, which has not been addressed so far. The research method in this paper is descriptive and analytical, and data was collected via library sources. The information analysis method is qualitative. The results show that the artists by noticing the concepts and meanings of each story have tried to make visual connections in forms, spaces and compositions by using of visual symbols and have expanded the borders of meanings in their images with more artistic expressions.