Painting is one of the most cultivated visual arts in Persian culture: its roots go back over the centuries, nourished by the taste for accurate decoration that already characterized Achaemenid craftsmanship, by the imaginative refinement of the miniature, by the evocative power of popular representations of „storytellers „In tea houses. In fact, the Persian miniature, so rich in subtle delicacy that its artists use single-hair brushes, is famous all over the world. It is believed that the origin of this form of art can be traced back to the predilection for painting nurtured by the Persian religious leader Mani (216-277 AD). Later, since the Islamic doctrine, even without prohibiting them, did not favor portraits and depictions of people and events, for the decorations it was preferred to resort to calligraphy, floral motifs, geometric compositions, while polychromy survived only in ceramics and he painted only to illustrate texts, such as the Koran, scientific works, epic poems, legends, panegyrics in praise of the deeds of sovereigns or heroes.At the same time, Persian artists were also influenced by Byzantine manuscripts, especially under the profile of the hieratic immobility of Christian models. Already in the 11th century AD the Persians were considered the undisputed masters of miniature, and have remained so ever since. In the late fifteenth century and at the beginning of the next, this art reached the pinnacle of beauty and quality. In the city of Herat (now in Afghanistan) 40 calligraphers were permanently at work; in Tabriz a brilliant painter, Behzad, who directed the work of hundreds of artists, managed to renew the miniature by combining the traditional concept of decoration with a special taste for the realistic and the picturesque. The compositions of this period reveal courageous expressive talents, especially in the subtle harmony of colors. Scenes composed of a multitude of figures cover large pages without leaving gaps; the distances are expressed by the superimposition of the objects, all equally illuminated, with an overall result of great delicacy and splendid polychromy.A further step in the evolution of this art occurred thanks to the influence of the painter Reza Abbasi, when he began in the miniatures a certain degree of naked realism emerges. Abbasi was the first artist whose inspiration derived directly from scenes from the streets and bazaar of Isfahan. In this period the walls of the palaces were covered with frescoes on war themes or lighter subjects, then reproduced more and more frequently. Excellent examples are preserved in the Palace of Forty Columns (Chehel Sutun) in Isfahan. In the 19th century the miniature gradually began to fall into disuse, also due to the increasingly strong Western influence. Mirza Baba, official painter of the Qajar court, painted portraits of princes with significant expressiveness, but also chest lids, writing desks and mirror cases where the influence of the centuries-old tradition of miniature is very evident. In this period, also „naive“ murals, called „tea house paintings“, began to appear in Iran. These were large frescoes, or sequences of scenes, used as a reference by storytellers: there were illustrated the deeds of the legendary heroes of the Persian epic, immortalized by Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, such as Rostam, but also love stories such as that of Youssef and Zuleikha, and events in the history of Shiism, in particular the tragedy of Garbala, with the martyrdom of the holy Imam Hossein. painting, on the one hand by establishing specific courses and faculties in both the state and private school system, restoring museums, supporting the foundation of galleries and special exhibitions, on the other hand allowing Iranian scholars and artists to turn their attention to the peculiarly pictorial tradition Persian, which the Pahlavi monarchy had stubbornly neglected by imposing the indiscriminate Westernization of all the artistic manifestations of the country. The pre-eminent figure of twentieth-century Iranian painting is Kamal-ol-Molk, who died in 1940 and is considered not only the father of modern national figurative art, but one of the country’s most loved symbols. We owe to him, in fact, the radical renewal of Persian painting techniques, the birth of a new concept of style as a desire to overcome tradition, both by revolutionizing the compositional formulas and by assigning to the painting the task of expressing and communicating the „spirit of the time „.
the most important Iranian painters are: Hosein Behzad, morteza katozian, nasrin khosravi, kamolol molk, ashtiani