Iconographic Themes in the Wall Paintings of Nasir al-Mulk House in Shiraz

One of the most important eras in the development of Iran’s art and architecture, especially in the format of murals, is the Qajar era. The dominant attributes of this period are relations with the West and adopting its culture and art. Qajar’s mural art was represented in different buildings, including houses. Nasir al-Mulk House of Shiraz is one of the buildings of the Qajar era, and in its Shahneshin Hall, there are prominent and diverse ceiling paintings. Given that the existing paintings on the ceilings of this building provide a combination of Iranian and Western concepts and contents, the comparative study of their motifs becomes significant both for a better understanding of the visual and topical approaches of the ceiling painting art of the Qajar and also to fill the gap of the comparative information in this field.The ceiling painting of the aforementioned building was studied to answer the following question: What contents and representations do these paintings imply based on the iconographical comparative analysis?This research aims to identify, study, and carry out a comparative evaluation of the motifs in the ceiling of the Nasir al-Mulk House based on the iconography method.In addition to the library studies, this research was supplemented by data from field investigations, including in-site examination, documenting the paintings, and also describing and explaining them.The results of this research provoke the readers’ attention not only to the existing motifs in each mural but also to their latent concepts. The semantic perspective of the art of this era discloses the fact that despite the imitation and separation from originality, this art reached an individual identity that could be named as Qajar style. In the end, this research was an endeavor to provide a deep understanding of the existing concepts in the murals of this era in Shiraz and to discover the ontological viewpoints of individuals in this period.