Arts of Iran

The grammar of Iranian architecture is built from three elements: the iwan (a vaulted hall open at one end, framing a courtyard), the double-shell brick dome, and the geometric chahār-bāgh ("four-garden") plan that divides space into quadrants by axial water channels. The four-iwan mosque, brought to maturity in the Seljuk Friday Mosque of Isfahan in the eleventh century, became the dominant religious plan from Cairo to Samarkand.

The Safavid era produced the architectural climax of the tradition. Shah Abbas's Naqsh-e Jahan Square — at 89,600 m² one of the largest urban squares in the world — frames four masterpieces on its four sides: the Shah (Imam) Mosque, the Sheikh Lotfollah Mosque, the Ali Qapu palace, and the Qaisarieh bazaar gate. The chromatic seven-color tile mosaics of these buildings, the muqarnas (stalactite) vaults, and the great kāshī-kāri tilework remain a visual benchmark of the entire Islamic world.

In 2007 Peter Lu and Paul Steinhardt of Princeton showed in Science that the tile patterns on the Darb-i Imam shrine in Isfahan (1453) instantiate "Penrose tilings" — quasi-crystalline patterns that mathematicians believed were not discovered in the West until the 1970s.

Built in Shiraz between 1876 and 1888, the Nasir al-Mulk Mosque ("Pink Mosque") is now one of the most photographed buildings in the world. Its western prayer hall is fronted with stained-glass windows that, on a winter morning, project a kaleidoscope of color across the carpets and the spiral columns within.

In 1949 a Soviet expedition unearthed in a frozen Scythian tomb in the Altai Mountains a knotted-pile carpet so well preserved that its 360 knots per square inch are still legible. The Pazyryk Carpet dates from the fifth century BCE — making it the oldest knotted-pile carpet in the world by more than a thousand years. Its design — a central field of square rosettes framed by borders of horsemen and grazing deer — is unmistakably Achaemenid Persian.

The Persian carpet has remained one of the great craft traditions of the world ever since. The Ardabil Carpet (1539–40, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum) measures 10.5 × 5.3 meters and contains an estimated 26 million knots; William Morris called it "the finest Eastern carpet which I have seen." UNESCO inscribed both the carpet weaving of Fars and the carpet weaving of Kashan on the Intangible Heritage list in 2010.

The Persian miniature — small, jewel-like paintings produced as illustrations to manuscripts of the Shahnameh, Khamseh of Nezami, and other classics — is one of the most distinctive painting traditions in world art. Its conventions — high horizon, flattened perspective, intense saturated color, simultaneous narration of multiple moments within a single frame — were perfected at the courts of the Timurids (Herat, fifteenth century) and Safavids (Tabriz and Isfahan, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries).

The greatest of all Persian painters, Kamal al-Din Behzād (c. 1450–1535), worked first at Sultan Husayn Bayqara's court in Herat and later at Shah Ismail's in Tabriz. His students produced the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp (c. 1525–1540) — 258 illustrations across 759 folios, often called the most magnificent illustrated manuscript ever made.

Calligraphy is, in the Islamic tradition, the art of arts — and Iran developed two scripts that became standard across the Persian-influenced world. Nastaʿlīq, perfected by Mir Ali Tabrizi in the late fourteenth century, is the script of Persian poetry: cursive, asymmetric, with letters that hang from above as if from a horizontal beam. Shekasteh nastaʿlīq ("broken nastaʿlīq") is its rapid-cursive cousin, used for letters and chancery documents.

Modern masters such as Mir Emad (d. 1615), whose single-line specimens still command record prices at auction, defined the canon. UNESCO inscribed the art of Iranian nastaʿlīq calligraphy on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2021.

Classical Iranian music is organized around the radif — a canonical repertoire of roughly 250 short melodic units (gushe) grouped into seven dastgāh and five āvāz modal systems. A traditional musician memorizes the entire radif before being permitted to improvise upon it; the relationship between fixed canon and improvised performance is sometimes compared to that of jazz with its standards. UNESCO inscribed the radif of Iranian music on the Intangible Heritage list in 2009.

The principal instruments — the long-necked lutes tār and setār, the trapezoid hammered-dulcimer santur, the spike-fiddle kamāncheh, the goblet drum tombak, and the reed flute ney — define a sound world unmistakably its own. The poetry sung over them is almost always classical: Hafez, Saʿdi, Rumi, Khayyam.

Since the late 1960s Iranian cinema has won an unbroken series of major prizes at Cannes, Venice and Berlin. Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry (Palme d'Or, 1997), Asghar Farhadi's A Separation (Academy Award, Best Foreign Language Film, 2012) and The Salesman (Academy Award, 2017), Jafar Panahi's The Circle (Golden Lion, 2000) and Taxi (Golden Bear, 2015), and the work of Majid Majidi, Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Samira Makhmalbaf have made Iranian cinema, in the words of Werner Herzog, "the most important national cinema in the world today."

"The most important national cinema in the world today — artistically — is the Iranian."