Exploring Architectural Ornamentation: A Focus on Tile Decorations in Painting Schools

Visual documents, including paintings, are among the most important sources in researching the history of Iranian architecture. However, the capacities and special importance of these paintings have not been sufficiently emphasized and utilized in architectural research. Therefore, there is a need for a deeper examination and analysis of these paintings and their effects on architecture. The Herat School stands as one of the significant schools in the history of Iranian architecture. This school is capable of realistically representing the architectural spaces of the Timurid period, which is particularly important because the architecture of this period exhibits realistic and reflective features of Islamic architectural elements. In this article, the level of realism of the tile decorations in Behzad's paintings has been investigated and analyzed. The current research method is non-experimental and based on an interpretive-historical approach. In fact, by prioritizing the logic of "the possibility of extracting documents in the field" and "the extraction of images used in the documents" as inferential and indicative conditions in the logic of research evidence, random sampling has been utilized. The research structure, relying on Behzad's images and architectural concepts depicted in his paintings, begins with an introduction from this artist and then proceeds to analyze the influential real buildings in those works.