The studies that have examined the Persian language and literature’s presence in Iranian painting have summarized this presence only as a visual representation of the literary text in the painting, through a type of reductionist approach. This approach only considers and analyzes the research data, the literary texts and the illustrated miniatures that are based on them, and the presence of Persian language and literature is overlooked in the totality of the paintings’ creation process. As a result, in this reductionist approach, the other forms of Persian language and literature’s presence in Iranian paintings are eliminated.
In the reductionist approach, the presence of Persian language and literature in Iranian paintings has been ignored, and only the relation between the visual objects in the painting and the text of the poem has been explained and analyzed. The purpose of this study is to identify and distinguish the presence of Persian language and literature in the whole process of creating miniatures in Iranian painting. Therefore, the question is in what forms Persian language and literature have been present in the process of creating miniatures in Iranian painting?
The present qualitative study was conducted through content analysis method using the Jürgen Ritsert analytical method. Data collection is done using archival, library and internet resources. Content analysis is a process of reading a text, gaining proper understanding of seemingly irrelevant information, analyzing qualitative information, systematic observation and conversion of qualitative data into quantitative ones. In the present study, the content analysis method has an interpretive nature. And according to the mentioned model, it began with the theoretical stage (i.e. the formation of the initial plans, questions and analyzed resources), and the process of creating paintings and different Iranian schools up to the Safavi era were examined. Then, in the unit construction stage, groups and units of analysis were divided into several categories: "painter" (or their students who did the act of painting), "painting as a product of artistic and technical activities", "collection of technical and artistic actions that the painter applied on the painting". In the data evaluation stage, appropriate analyses were performed related to the research, and the presence of literature was investigated in relation to each of these three groups. Finally, in the results interpretation stage, a conclusion was reached based on the research problem.
Accordingly, in the production line of paintings in libraries, three units of analysis can be distinguished: The first is the painter, the painters and their students who did the painting. The second component is the product of their artistic and technical activities on the affected surface, namely painting, and the third part is all the technical and artistic works that the painter and the students performed on the painting. In response to the question of what are the forms of the presence of Persian literature in Iranian painting, the findings of this study show that Persian language and literature have been present in the whole process of producing miniature in Iranian painting. Literature acted as a medium for the artist to understand mysticism, and in order to illustrate the literary text, the mental perceptions of the painter and the writer of the literary text have been united. Persian language and literature also conditioned the minds of some painters due to the calligraphic limitations that prevailed over writing in Persian language and literature. Existence of Persian letters and texts in the form of calligraphy in the paintings, the principle of the internal relation between image and text, and the representation of the opposition between the external matter (appearance) and the internal matter (within) in literature and mysticism in the formal structure of miniatures is a clear example of the presence of Persian language and literature in painting. During the technical operation, the painter looks for the pictorial equivalent of the metaphorical language of literature and prepares a list of conventional motifs. He also uses the metaphorical style as an illustration technique to enrich the image. In addition, the signs that referred to the text were also used to induce psychological aspects.
As noted, the inseparable nature of the history of Iranian painting with Persian literature is not limited to the conformity of the drawing and the text. Rather, Persian language and literature are presen