Discussing the Principles of Philosophical and Artist-oriented Criticism in Masnavi

Discussions about art criticism, philosophy of arts and esthetics are most often present in the works of non-Iranian thinkers and scholars. In some ancient Iranian texts and sources, one can find articles and discussions about the work of art, the artist and the audience. One of these sources is the spiritual Masnavi of Maulana Jalaluddin Mohammad Balkhi. In this book, there are scattered and incoherent verses from which topics related to works of art and art can be extracted. The purpose of the present article is to analyze certain parts of Masnavi Manavi in order to explain the philosophical basics of art criticism. In this article, which has been done based on a qualitative content analysis method, first the verses related to art and artistry have been extracted from Masnavi and then encoded and analyzed. The method of data collection was library and its tool has been identification. The research community is the Masnavi verses of which have been sampled purposefully. The results of this article show that the artist is also considered as the source of the work of art, too. In creating the work, the artist deals with two stages of inbound and outbound creation. In the stage of receiving (inner radiance), he must polish his heart to receive the designs, and in the stage of creation (outer radiance), he must be trained and be fully acquainted with materials. The artist must be creative; that is, he should have a personal style and avoid imitation.