Recognizing the Function of Nazirehsazi in 16th Century Painting (Inves tigating the Reciprocal Relationship Between Habitus and Field With the Focus on Sultan Mohammad Works)

The arrival of Safavid Empire (1501 - 1736) to the realm of his tory can be deemed as an inflection point in the relationships among artis ts and people involved in traditional Iranian drawing arts. In this period, for the firs t time, many artis ts from different schools (genres) of painting art gathered in the same organization or party under the rule of a single leadership. Before Kamal ud-Din Behzad came to Tabriz (the capital or central city of Safavid Empire), Sultan Mohammad-e Tabrizi was considered the head artis t of the royal library. However, as Shah Ismail favored Kamal ud-Din Behzad who was one of the leading and avant-garde painters of Herat’s atelier in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, Sultan Mohammad-e Tabrizi decided to pursue a different s trategy or tactic to handle the new set of rules and relations that had arisen in the world of painting artis ts. His s trategy was to turn to Nazirehsazi. Nazireh is a piece of art work that an artis t makes in response to or in rivalry with an art work made by another artis t. It is usually a way of showing off one’s skill and daring the other artis t to produce a similar art work. This idea may help one discover new findings about some important art pieces that were made in the 16th century by analyzing the relations and connections between people that played a role in the field of drawing arts at that time. Our inves tigating work, in addition to accounting for the his torical relations and social changes that impacted arts in early Safavid period, sheds light on the relationships among artis ts, their possible personal motivations, and the influence of these relations and motivations on the works of the artis ts. The main goal is to unders tand how the relations and politics among players in the field of arts in the 16th century have manifes ted themselves in the work of artis ts (in particular, Sultan Mohammad-e Tabrizi). Therefore, the activity of the artis t in response to or as a result of the governing rules and politics has been analyzed and explained. To this end, as a firs t s tep, the primary his torical documents are inves tigated and analyzed completely. Thus, our inves tigation has a qualitative and his torical nature. Using an explanatory-analytic method, we shed light on the especial and symbolic performance of Sultan Mohammad-e Tabrizi amid the ongoing social and political forces at that time. The analytic method used in this paper for explaining and interpreting the texts and art works is Pierre Bourdieu’s relation-oriented theory of sociology. This method helped us unders tand that the social relations in the field of arts in Safavid era caused the artis ts and other players choose appropriate s trategies based on the field circums tances and also according to their own personal character and symbolic capital. These players also exploited the rules governing parallel fields (similar to the field of literature).