A Study of Women’s Outfits in Two Qajar Manuscripts: Sani ol-Molk’s Farhad and Shirin, and Emad ol-Ketab’s Shahnameh from the Perspective of “Innocent Eye Myth” By Ernst Gombrich

Qajar art can be studied in two periods. The first period, known in the context of painting as “royal painting,” is believed to have reached its peak during the reign of Fath-Ali Shah and lasted to the end of Mohammad Shah’s reign. The second period matured with the beginning of Naser al-Din Shah’s rule and continued through his successors to the end of the Qajar dynasty. It appears that some of the pictures in the few surviving manuscripts of the second half of the Qajar era owe to royal painting, despite the historical delay. This becomes especially clear when exploring the ways they depict women’s outfits. Meanwhile, Ernst Gombrich, the renowned art historian, attests to the fact that every artist owes to their predecessors and is influenced more by their peers than reality; a fact he interprets as the myth of the “innocent eye” and considers as the result of the influence of past experiences on the present. Gombrich holds that the teachings of the past influence artists more strongly than their perception of the real world, insofar as they are considered indebted to their precursors. This way, by studying the outfits of women depicted in Sani ol-Molk’s “Farhad and Shirin” and Emad ol-Ketab’s “Shahnameh,” conceived in the second half of the Qajar era, during Naser al-Din Shah’s and Mozaffar al-Din Shah’s reigns respectively, and by considering the differences in their rendering—differences that are, in a way, in a reversed historical sequence—one may pose the question, What do the differences between the women’s outfits depicted in Emad ol-Ketab’s Shahnameh and those seen in Sani ol-Molk’s Farhad and Shirin suggest in terms of Ernst Gombrich’s innocent eye myth? The results of this paper, which audits four illustrations from Emad ol-Ketab’s Shahnameh and Sani ol-Molk’s Farhad and Shirin using the analytical comparative method, indicate that female figures in Emad ol-Ketab’s Shahnameh present their true values when compared to the royal court iconographies from the first half of the Qajar period. On the other hand, Sani ol-Molk’s Farhad and Shirin, despite preceding the former, features the characteristics of the second style in depicting women’s outfits and references the necessity of particular pieces of clothing in the society at the time. This attests to the fact that, unlike Sani ol-Molk, whose training was influenced by Western naturalism, an unknown painter of Emad ol-Ketab, was probably taught by traditional miniature painters and emerged from that scene. Thus, unlike Sani ol-Molk, who tried to represent the society, the illustration in Emad ol-Ketab’s Shahnameh picture women in the appropriate outfit that even, includes the stylistic features of women’s outfits in the first period. Indeed, his informal education may have contributed to him not considering his final work, despite containing about 40 illustrations, worthy of bearing an artist signature and date in the heyday of Sani ol-Molkian naturalism, and, thus, preparing for the book to become forgotten to the point of failing to be included in the large manuscript collection of the Golestan Palace Royal Library.