Iranian arts
Iranian arts
Iran tour information/Iranian arts
Learn to pronounce
These arts have been shaped by diverse cultures that flourished on the vast Iranian Plateau. Rock art is the most ancient surviving art that has been used to decorate palaces of Ancient Persian Art
Iran tour information/Iranian arts
Carpet
Carpet plays an important role in Persian art. With its detailed designs and vast variety in color and pattern Persian carpet is one of the most famous and luxurious home decoration around the world.
This precious hand woven textile is an essential part of Persian culture and is still manufactured by nomadic tribes, artisans in village and town workshops. The pattern can represent different tradition and mirror the history of Iran and Persian various peoples.
The carpets woven in the Safavid court manufactories of Isfahan during the sixteenth century are famous for their elaborate colors and artistic design, and are treasured in museums and private collections all over the world today.
Iran tour information/Iranian arts
Miniature
A Persian miniature is a richly detailed small painting which represent religious or mythological stories from Iran. The art of miniature painting in Persia flourished from the 13th through the 16th centuries, and fortunately continues to this day, thanks to contemporary artists producing notable Persian miniatures. These delicate and colorful illustrations are typically visually stunning, with a level of detail which can only be achieved by very fine hands and extremely small brushes.
Iran tour information/Iranian arts
Luristan bronzes
Weapons, jewelry, belt buckles, and ritual objects of bronze probably dating from roughly 1500 to 500 BC have been excavated in valleys of the Zagros Mountains in the Lorestān region of western Iran.
Luristan bronzes are small cast objects decorated with bronze sculptures from the Early Iron Age which have been found in large numbers in this Province and Kermanshah in west-central Iran. The ethnicity of the people who created them remains unclear,
although they may well have been Persian, possibly related to the modern Lur people who have given their name to the area.
Iran tour information/Iranian arts
Iran Rock relief
Rock relief was a common medium in Persian art mostly used to glorify the king and proclaim Persian control over territory
These large carved rock relief were placed near a source of water or by the entrance of the king palaces to praise the king and show its power.
Naqsh-e Rostam, an ancient necropolis located about 12 km northwest of Persepolis, is one example of a remarkable rock relief from both the Achaemenid and Sassanid periods.
Iran tour information/Iranian arts
Iranian music
The history of musical development in Iran dates back thousands of years. Archaeological records Indicates Zoroastrian rituals and the military instrument. Two instruments may have survived from this ancient time:
Music had a high place at the Sassanian courts especially at the court of Khosro II (called Khosro Parviz) who ruled from
A typical Iranian classical performance consists of five parts, namely pišdarāmad ("prelude"; a composed metric piece), čahārmezrāb (a fast, metric piece with a repeated rhythmic pattern), āvāz (the improvised central piece), tasnif (a composed metric song of classical poetry), and reng (a rhythmic closing composition) A performance forms a sort of suite. Unconventionally, these parts may be varied or omitted.
Iran's classical art music relies on both improvisation and composition, and is based on a series of modal scales and tunes. Iran's classical art music is vocal based, and the vocalist plays a crucial role, as he or she decides what mood to express and which dastgah relates to that mood.
Iran tour information/Iranian arts
Shahram Nazeri
is one of Iran’s most popular tenor singers and a master of the Persian classical and Sufi repertoires. He was born to a musical Kurdish family in Kermanshah city, Western Iran, in 1950 and joined Sufi ensembles at the age of eight. When he was eleven, he sang on Iranian television and started to study the traditional repertoire or radif. He became attracted to the mysteries of Sufism and its music and literature through the works of Rumi, Sheikh Attar and others.
He has won many prizes and has sung with the leading ensembles of Iran, Sheyda and Aref. His performances in Europe, the Middle East, and North America have been acclaimed for their poetry and virtuosity.
Iran tour information/Iranian arts
Mohammad Reza Shajarian
is an internationally and critically acclaimed Iranian classical singer, composer and Ostad (master) of Persian traditional music. His ability in choosing lyrics, playing with the words created some of the best everlasting pieces of Persian traditional music. In 1999 UNESCO in France presented him with the Picasso Award and in 2006 with the UNESCO Mozart Medal.
Iran tour information/Iranian arts
Poetry
Described as one of the great literatures of humanity, including Goethe's assessment of it as one of the four main bodies of world literature, Persian literature has its roots in surviving works of Old Persia. The great medieval Persian poets owe much to the mystical Sufi tradition within Islam, which understands life as a journey in search of enlightenment, and, like their European contemporaries, they combine religious and secular themes. While celebrating the beauty of the world in poems about love, wine, and poetry itself, or telling humorous anecdotes of everyday life, they use these subjects to symbolize deeper concerns with wisdom, mortality, salvation, and the quest for God.
Iran tour information/Iranian arts
HAFEZ
Hafez a suffi poet, expressed in poetry love for divine and uses wine as the symbol for love. The intoxication results from both love and wine is a fitting comparison.
Hafez is one of the most prominent and praised poets in Iran, he influenced writers and poet in around the world such as Goethe and emerson.
Divan of Hafez can be found at every Iranian home or library.
Hafez poet is also used for fortune telling, at Nowruz or Yalda night, families get together and make a wish before opening randomly the Divan to read the poem, which they believe to be a sign of things that will happen in the future. His tomb, Hafezieh, is located at a garden in Shiraz to honor the memory of this celebrated poet.
In meek sacrifice
For another’s sake,
All man’s striving vain,
Lavish’d as the price
Of the heart’s hid pain—
Long, O spirit-bird,
Of thy lonely fear
Hast thou sung unheard
In hope’s moon-lit wood,
While no creature near
Knew nor understood.
Iran tour information/Iranian arts
RUMI
Rumi has been described as the "most popular poet" and the "best-selling poet" in the United States. Rumi believed passionately in the use of music, poetry and dance as a path for reaching God. For Rumi, music helped devotees to focus their whole being on the divine and to do this so intensely that the soul was both destroyed and resurrected. It was from these ideas that the practice of whirling Dervishes developed into a ritual form.
Rumi's works are written mostly in Persian, but occasionally he also used Turkish, Arabic, and Greek, in his verse. His Masnavi, composed in Konya, is considered one of the greatest poems of the Persian language. His works are widely read today in their original language across Greater Iran and the Persian-speaking world. Translations of his works are very popular, most notably in Turkey, Azerbaijan, the United States, and South Asia
A moment of happiness,
you and I sitting on the verandah,
apparently two, but one in soul, you and I.
We feel the flowing water of life here,
you and I, with the garden's beauty
and the birds singing.
The stars will be watching us,
and we will show them
what it is to be a thin crescent moon.
Iran tour information/Iranian arts
KHAYAM
Persian mathematician, astronomer and poet best known for Rubaiyat; also helped to reform the solar calendar. Khayyam is best known as a result of Edward Fitzgerald’s popular translation in 1859 of nearly 600 short four line poems, the Rubaiyat.
The verses written by Khayyam reveal a man of deep thought, troubled by the questions of the nature of reality and the eternal, the impermanence and uncertainty of life, and man’s relationship to God. The writer doubts the existence of divine providence and the afterlife, derides religious certainty, and feels keenly man’s frailty and ignorance.
Wake! For the Sun, who scattered into flight
The Stars before him from the Field of Night,
Drives Night along with them from Heav’n and strikes
The Sulan’s Turret with a Shaft of Light.