Like their fellow ancient Iranian craftsmen, the country's painters of the 16th to 19th century also heavily incorporated various elements of graphic design into their figurative paintings.  They  painted life-sized stylized characters on murals and oils on canvas.Their figures  featuring a  languid, idealized, oval face, was painted with soft, sleepy, and doe eyes, and used heavily ornamented  headgear  and elaborated decorative patterns  in their  characters' costumes and other paraphernalia to  create some added aesthetic dimensionalities in their figurative compositions. They worked not only on canvases, and wooden boards, but also on manuscripts, illustrations, watercolours, and  miniatures. Therefore, the history og graphic design in Iran is closely linked to the history of Iranian painting.

In1501, Ismaeil Safavi and his Qizilbash warriors wrested control of Azerbaijan from the Aq Quyunlu, and in the same year Ismaeil was crowned in Tabriz as the first Safavid shah of Iran (r. 1501–24). Thus, Iran was once again united under the rule of the Safavid dynasty (1501–1722).  This was the greatest post-Islamic dynasty in Iran, which patronized various cultural aspects of the country . The dynasty descended from a long line of Sufi shaikhs whose headquarters  were at Ardabil, in northwestern Iran.  Within ten years, all of Iran was brought under Safavid dominion, and this was accomplished by the support  of Turkman tribesmen known as the Qizilbash, or red heads, on account of their distinctive red caps .  Safavid recognized Shiei Islam  as the official religion of the state, which throughout the sixteenth century was confronted by two powerful Sunni states in their neighborhood, the Shaibanids to the east and the Ottomans to the west.

The Safavids  fostered closer diplomatic ties with the European powers, in order to cement alliances against the Ottomans. As a result of this closer relationship,  European cultural influence penetrated the country. From the description of Western travelers it is known that there once existed wall paintings; with battle scenes in Shiraz showing the capture of Hormuz from the Portuguese, as well as erotic scenes in Julfa, and pastoral scenes at the Hazar Jarib palace in Isfahan. In the late seventeenth century, the imprint of European painting, such as the use of perspective, the thick-foliaged trees, and the shaded hills appears in the style of certain Persian artists such as Muhammad Zaman. 




After a long period of instability and isolation that followed the collapse of the culturally enlightened Safavid Empire, Nader Shah of Afshar reunified the country. Nader used his military leadership to restore order after the Afghan invasion of the country in 1722. He defeated the Mughal army in 1739 and seized the capital, Delhi. Among the loot he acquired was the Mughal emperor's jewels. Being a warrior king, Nader did not have much time for the art. The above images are the only two portraits of him in oil  that survive.  He was assassinated in 1747, and one of his generals,  Karim Khan of Zand, became a major contender for power.  Karim Khan was challenged by several adversaries but,  he gained control of central and southern parts of Iran, and to legitimize his power base, he enthroned the infant Shah Ismaeil III, the grandson of the last official Safavid king. This, of course, meant that Ismaeil was only a figurehead  and the real power resided with Karim Khan.

 Karim Khan,  who never assumed the title of the Emperor or Shahanshah, was a compassionate leader. He was an enthusiastic patron of art and culture, and the Zand style which incorporated many of the principle of graphic design into painting flourished during his era.  An example of this style is the above painting in which  Karim Khan is sitting informally among his courtiers and is smoking hookah. He wears a traditional Zand turban, but no imperial insignia adorns his costume. The artist plays artfully with the color and composition of ten various turbans of the courtiers, and the decoration of pattern of Karim Khan costume is repeated on the costumes of the two that flank the Shah at each side, and thus crating a balanced composition.   The painting is attributed to the work to Muhammad Sadiq.


Zand paintings were imaginative, versatile, and compositionally powerful. The subject matter of these paintings  had evolved from the magnificent  royal narratives of the Safavid school into an intimate and romanticized themes of human emotions.   In his  painting, Two Lovers,  the artist, Muhammad Sadiq, celebrates the intimate  expression of human sensitivity in the elegant  decorative style of Zand period. He uses symbolism in this painting, through objects such as watermelon, apple  and glass of wine to convey a secret impetuous fire of a youth for an innocent adventure with ice and desire of his beloved.




Portrait of a Dancing Girl, signed and dated Muhammad Baqir, 1778.  The artist depicts a dancer with a wonderfully detailed long  shawl that has been wrapped around her waist and tied in front around her belt buckle. As she pinches one end up with her castanets, the other falls down in a smooth telescopic twist with the pattern clearly visible.


The Qajar style, started shortly after the Zand era, during the Qajar Dynasty  1781-1925 . The Qajar artists ushered in a renascence of artistic expression and spiritual enlightenment that was influenced by European culture . Qajars were Turkic tribal warlords who fought in the army of Nader Shah, defeating the Afghan invaders of Iran and  conquering India.   They ruthlessly rose to power in the late eighteenth century. The early years of Fath Ali Shah, the second Qajar monarch, coincided with the Napoleonic wars, and a diplomatic struggle at the Persian court involving  a number of European countries, which once again opened the gates to  the cultural influence of Europe.




The laws of perspective entered into Qajar style as a result of the restoration of Persian contact with Europe.  Using vibrant  European color pallets in strikingly balanced compositions, Qajar artists depicted Iranian monarchs and their royal household at various functions. The style reached its zenith  when Persian artists such as Abu Hassan Ghaffari (1842-66) joined the European art schools in the late 19th century.  It was this exposure that transformed  the Qajar style of oil painting into an aesthetically sophisticated and pleasing art form, which is now heavily demanded in by the art collectors throughout the world.

It would be perhaps of interest to apply the modern grammatical principles of visual communication to the Zand and Qajar  era painting, in order to reveal various levels of their meanings.  Such a study would suggest that the oft-depicted figures of Kings Such as Fath Ali Shah, or Mohammad Shah, and princes like Abbas Mirza and their various courtiers and concubines  had the potential to realize certain glorified mystical, as well as feudalistic power concepts for their viewers, all  in the context of the Persian  historical, cultural, and philosophical  backgrounds.

Long standing findings from design, art, and advertising research indicate that visual elements such as shape, color, logo, and typeface are not only perceived in terms of their formal or technical properties but also in terms of the symbolic or affective connotations they embody. The  socio-historical meanings of Qajar paintings  are encoded through a stylized technique of representation, with a particular modality of address to the viewer, involving a complex network of compositional relationships. The meanings are realized by decoding of facial idealization, linear outlines, and stylized geometric surfaces involving chromatically appropriate colors, decoration, rhythms, degrees of illumination and their spatial orientation. These are the same elements that Wassily Kandinsky enumerated as the basic elements of abstract painting in terms of their ‘affective sounds’, relating, for instance, the ‘above’ to emancipation and freedom, and the ‘below’ to heaviness and constraint. In explaining such relations, Kandinsky proposed an artistic sensitivity which he referred to as the artist’s ability to “feel the breathing of the still untouched plane”.

Visual communication theorists, like O'Toole, and  Kress and van Leeuwen , have argued that there is a 'grammar' of painting, which in any attempt to analyze various types of semiotic systems, one needs to understand it. In this grammar there is a need "to isolate a hierarchy of comparable units of structure". According to  Kress and van Leeuwen , presentational processes can be  of two major kinds: actional and reactional. In actional processes, like the image above,   the charter's  action or pose creates a power relation between the represented participants -- the viewer  and the image.

If an image,  like the above picture, has only one participant -- the viewer,   the action has a non-transactional structure, as it has no goal. It is not “aimed at” or “done to” anyone or anything. The image is a detached report on a physician taking the pulse of a sick man,  surrounded by other patients waiting for their appointments.  


If an image has two participants, Kress and van Leeuwen describe one as the actor, the other as the goal. The actor is the participant, like the Shah in the above image, from whom the action originates. The participant, or the viewer, at whom the action is aimed is the goal. Such a structure is described as transactional. When the vector creating the relation between two or more participants is the result of a look or gaze, which is a type of grammatical vector, such as the gaze of Mohammad Shah of Qajar, in the above portrait by Haji Mohammad Naqashbashi, Kress and van Leeuwen describe the process as reactional. The participants in such a structure are termed reactors (instead of actors) and phenomena (instead of goals).

This grammar of the visual imagery, as communication theorist, O'Toole  has argued have certain affinities with notions of Realization, and Rank scale, in the grammatical system of language. Realization in the grammar of language refers to  a relationship between levels of  socio-economic-based meanings, such as those deriving from  production relationships and ownership of means of production, as well as the power relationships in a social discourse. In this case the influences of  feudal characteristics of the society can be deciphered from these images.  According to O’Toole's argument, the discourse and grammatical systems for visual imagery require descriptive categories and analytical approaches in order to be able to visually express such inferences.  In a visual context these grammatical tools are dubbed as;  Mood, Transitivity, and Theme, and  the descriptive categories for analyzing the experiential meaning of the whole image and relations between the component parts are Scene, Sub-Scenes and Components.

Viewers, as the readers of the image, are positioned so they respond to the images with varying degrees of intimacy. Their reaction will emanate from the impact of framing. This grammatical code would allow the viewer to fancifully get closer to the participants. For instance, a viewer of the above portrait  would feel closer to the Shah, perhaps viewing him as a fatherly figure, whereas in his previous portrait there was  a more distant point of view, with the participants being viewed as a distant subjects. Thus, an image of just the face or head of the participants denotes an intimate distance, where as shot of the head and shoulders represents a close personal distance. A figure from the waist up encodes a far personal distance.

Group Portrait of the Foreign Affairs Minister, Mirza Saeed Khan (RHS), and Foreign envoys of (RtL) Ottoman Empire, Tsarist Russia, and France (Comte de Gobineau,  aristocrat, novelist and diplomat for the French Second Empire, who became famous for developing the racialist theory of the Aryan master race in his book An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races), circa 1857, oil on canvas, Golestan Palace Museum.

 A far social distance is represented in the framing of the whole figures of a group of people, like the above portrait, whereas an image, like the portrait of Mohammad Shah below, in which his whole figure is shown, is framed as a close social distance. 


The semiotics of painting or art is viewed and interpreted in terms of the levels of the Picture (the whole work -- in the above picture the Shah seated on a chair in an interior), Episode (stages in the story or message portrayed -- here the Shah wearing a red coat copiously embellished with pearls and diamonds, in a blue sash,  on a carpet decorated with pearls,), Figure (animate beings -- here the man identified in  inscription in cusped cartouche reading Al-Sultan bin al-Sultan Muhammad Shah Qajar), and Member (parts of the figures-- here the Shah's face with a thick beard and wearing a tall black cap encrusted with gems, holding a scepter completely covered in diamonds and rubies, in his lap a sword encrusted with diamonds, jeweled epaulettes, bazubands, tassels and cuffs).



O'Toole claims that the framework he presents for the semiotic analysis of displayed art is not designed to be a formalized constraint on the interpretation of an artwork's meaning, but should be viewed as a 'map' which schematizes "the semiotic space created by the work within which our perceptions and conceptions are negotiated". He also proposes that there are some advantages to initially approaching an analysis from the Modal rather than the Representational functional dimension of meaning, despite the obvious pressure in visual analysis to start with the  the topical nature of what is being visually represented.

 Abolhassan Ghafari, Meeting, watercolor and ink on paper, in an Italian private collection, 1845

The advantages of a Modal analysis, according to O'Toole, are threefold: firstly, the Modal systems most probably affect the nature of the initial engagement with the work; secondly, an effective description would counteract the common tendency towards a form/content dichotomy among art critics; and thirdly, a modal-based semiotic analysis may provide students and lovers of art with a language to describe what is actually seen, rather than what art historians believe should be known as background knowledge. This suggestion appears of some merits, particularly with respect to an enigmatic  painting such as  Abolhassan Ghafari's Meeting, depicted above. The discovery of Representational functional dimension of meaning in this painting is rather hazardous.  Does the painter wants us feel sorry  for the chair of the meeting, who with his fallen shoulders appear to feel helpless? Does the strange look on the face of the young servant at the top right corner express boredom? The paining, obviously, can be a subject   of a detailed analysis. 



  Portraying Persian women in fashionable European attire was another significant innovation.

It should be noted that many of the systems which O'Toole identifies as resources for potential usage in art-based semiotic systems are similar to those described in Kress and van Leeuwen's ‘grammar of images' (e.g. the categories in the representation of action, of objects and of scenes; the forms of address realized by gaze, framing, color, illumination and perspective; the categories in composition such as framing, positioning in the visual space in terms of the horizontal, vertical and diagonal axes, and other factors such as colour coordination and the influence of size and framing on visual salience). These kinds of visual systems are of course used by O'Toole in a distinct way to express how meanings are realized in a specific visual mode, and there are some additional systems included which obviously apply specifically to displayed art (such as Stylization, Attenuation, Chiaroscuro etc.).

Reading visual images in terms of gaze through the codes of offers and demands allows us to identify mood. When someone in an image looks directly at the viewer, her gaze establishing a direct connection between her, the represented participant, and the viewer, an interactive participant. This establishes a demand, as it explicitly acknowledges the viewer: the producers of the image wish to influence the viewer in some way to enter to an imaginary relation with the represented participant.

The Lady Khorshid  painted by Ablhassan Ghafari, looks intently at the viewer, her gaze establishing a direct connection between her, the represented participant, and the viewer, an interactive participant. Kress and van Leeuwen call this visual configuration a demand, as she explicitly acknowledges the viewer:  the character  wishes to influence the viewer in some way to enter into an imaginary itellectual relation with the her. In this image, the woman’s body language, stance and gaze suggest a challenge to the target audience to comprehend her. The symbolic design pattern on  a darkly painted interior wall is in contrast with the clear sunny day outside.  Here a  connection is established between the lady  Khorshid  and the viewer, also because of the horizontal angle from the front, that is because she  is facing the viewer squarely. Such a representation invites the involvement of the reader with the image. 




When someone in an image does not look directly at the viewer, the viewer's role is that of an invisible and detached onlooker. This constitutes an offer, as the represented participants are depicted impersonally as items of information or objects of information or objects for viewer's contemplation. The  painting of a Tar player  involves a sophisticated interplay of action and reaction. The woman does not look directly at the viewer.  However,  the cat is depicted as gazing straight at the observer, creating a reactional structure in the same image. The creature's demand of the audience makes it an actor in a non-transactional action structure. The representation of the woman as goal is a central component of the positioning of her as an desirous figure for the viewers. Her attractiveness  and ability to seduce  men and then manipulate them to her own ends is suggested by her musical instrument, and is symbolized by a flower vase  at the left . The cat gazes at the viewer, reacting to his animalistic desire with a curious look, if not sarcastic  inquiry.

Horizontal angles encode the "involvement" of the reader with the image through frontal and oblique points of view. There is a shift from the more "naturalistic" to the predominance of signification. In the above image the woman acrobat dancer is depicted on an oblique angle ( i.e. the angle is not straight on) the viewer is being positioned to adopt a detached point of view.  The dancer is not recognized as part of the " dignified  world" of the reader : she belongs to  "them" rather than "us".



 Mirza Hassan Naghash, Portrait of  Abbas Qoli Khan Nuri on Hrsback, 1864 AD. Watercolor on board.

Reading visual images in terms of both the vertical and horizontal angles establishes whether the viewer is being positioned to adopt a subjective or objective point of view.  In the above subjective image  everything is arranged for the viewers, positioning them to adopt a particular stance with an image. The vertical angle defines the nature of the power relations between the viewer and the image. Such images tend to the naturalistic, as opposed to the symbolic. The represented participants , Abbas Qoli Khan Nuri, is depicted from a low angle - that is viewed from below - the interactive participants (both the composer of the image and the viewer) are in a position of submission to his power.

Qajar artists were as versatile as their Zand & Safavid predecessors in conveying meanings. Using gold and silver decorative patterns on headgear and royal costumes, Qajar artists depicted portraiture in flattened forms. Under the European influence, portrait artists used the western techniques of modeling figures to add a degree of naturalism to paintings.

The Royal Army Orchestra , Mosaic of  Shamsolemareh Palace

A Qajar Album

Barthes, R. (1977). The photographic message (S. Heath, Trans.) In S. Heath (Ed.), Image, music, text (pp. 15-31). New York: Hill and Wang.

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images:The Grammar of Visual Design,Routledge,1996
Barthes, R. (1977). The photographic message (S. Heath, Trans.) In S. Heath (Ed.), Image, music, text (pp. 15-31). New York: Hill and Wang.
Kandinsky, V. (1926). Point and line to plane. New York: Dover Publications.

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