INTRODUCTION
The history of graphic design in Iran cannot be adequately understood as a simple chronology beginning with the arrival of Western-style commercial design in the twentieth century. Iranian graphic design is the product of a far longer encounter between writing and image, manuscript and ornament, poetry and visual communication, Persian cultural identity and foreign influence, tradition and modernity, artistic freedom and political constraint.
Its distinctive character arises precisely from this historical layering. Iran possesses a visual culture extending across several millennia, incorporating Achaemenid and Sasanian monumental art, Persian manuscript illumination, miniature painting, calligraphy, ceramics, textiles, carpets, metalwork and architectural ornament, and eventually lithography, photography, posters, typography, cinema and digital media. The modern graphic designer therefore inherited not an empty field but an extraordinarily sophisticated visual vocabulary already many centuries in the making.
This point deserves emphasis, since it is easy for a modern reader to imagine "design history" as a Western export gradually absorbed by the rest of the world. Iran is a case in which the opposite is closer to the truth: a civilization whose artistic traditions were repeatedly renewed through contact with other cultures, and which possessed, well before the term "graphic design" existed, an inherited visual reservoir of miniature painting, tazhib illumination, calligraphy, ceramics, enamelling, engraving and tapestry upon which a modern discipline could later be constructed.
The central argument of this chapter is that Iranian graphic design became modern not by abandoning its Persian-Islamic visual heritage but by transforming that heritage into a modern language of communication. This transformation unfolded across several major stages: the ancient visual tradition of image and empire; the Islamic manuscript and calligraphic tradition, in which writing itself became image; the Qajar encounter with lithography and print; the emergence of professional graphic design as an academic and institutional discipline in the twentieth century; the extraordinary experimentation of the 1950s through the 1970s; the rupture of the 1979 Revolution and the Iran-Iraq War; the reconstruction of Iranian visual modernism
after 1990; and the internationalization of contemporary Iranian design through digital communication.
I. THE DEEP FOUNDATION: IRAN BEFORE GRAPHIC DESIGN
petrglyphs in Khomeyn - 10,000 BC
The term "graphic design" is modern, but the communicative functions associated with it are ancient. Long before paper, printing press or screen, Iranian civilization had already developed sophisticated systems of visual communication through monumental architecture, relief sculpture, royal inscriptions, dynastic symbols, coinage and decorative pattern. The visual identity of political authority was communicated through repeated representations of kingship, empire, military power, religious legitimacy and cosmic order — the same functions, in essence, that a modern visual identity system performs for a state or institution today.
Persepolis is especially significant in this respect. Its reliefs do not function merely as decoration. Their carefully ordered procession of peoples, costumes, gifts and royal symbolism constitutes a visual narrative of empire, in which the viewer encounters an organized image of political hierarchy and cultural plurality. It is, in the vocabulary of a later age, a coordinated visual system — a kind of proto-corporate identity for the Achaemenid state, repeated across surfaces, media and generations with remarkable consistency.
This suggests a principle that runs through the entire history that follows: Iranian visual communication has, from its earliest monumental expressions, been concerned with the relationship between image, identity and power. That relationship would reappear thousands of years later in posters, political graphics, revolutionary imagery, cultural campaigns and contemporary identity design.
It is also worth emphasizing the enormous geographical reach of the Persian empires and their sustained contact with Rome, Byzantium, India, China and Central Asia. Iranian visual culture should therefore not be read as an isolated national tradition but as a cross-cultural visual system from its inception. Iranian design consequently carries a productive paradox: it is deeply rooted in a particular linguistic and cultural tradition while remaining, at every stage of its history, historically cosmopolitan.
This Persian rock relief depicts Ardashir I Coronation scene; as the first king of the Sassanid Empire of Iran, Ardashir receives the ribboned diadem, the symbol of kingship, from the spirit of Darius I of Persia of the Achaemenid dynasty. Ardashir takes the diadem with his right hand, and salutes Darius with his left fist and pointed index finger as a token of respect and loyalty (a gesture depicted on many Sassanian rock reliefs). The image design is symmetric, balanced, and is focused on the daidem. Both kings are on horseback and are of equal size. Under the horse of the King Ardashir lies the last of the Parthian Kings, Artabanus IV of Parthia. Under the horse of King Darius lies Gaumata the usurper, a Magian,. The relief of Ardashir is, therefore, the legitimization of the new Sassanian dynasty by the pre-Alexander Achaemenid dynasty. The inscription in Persian, Parthian, and Greek, reads: ''This is the image of the Hormizd-worshipping Majesty Ardashir, whose origin is of the gods.''
"Just as we were established on the throne, the emperor Gordianus gathered in all of the Roman Empire an army of Goths and Gemans and marched ... against us. On the edges of Assyria,... there was a great frontal battle. And Gordianus Caesar perished, and we destroyed the Roman army. And the Romans proclaimed Philip emperor. And Philip Caesar came to us for terms, and paid us 500,000 denars as ransom for his life and beacme tributary to us".
II. MANUSCRIPT CULTURE: WHEN WRITING BECAME IMAGE
Perhaps the single most important foundation of Iranian graphic design is the extraordinary development of the illuminated manuscript. With the expansion of Islam, Arabic became the language of the Qur'an, while Persian developed in parallel as a major literary and administrative language, written in a script adapted from Arabic. In Iran, writing became far more than a neutral mechanism for transmitting language. It became an art in its own right.
Between roughly the eighth and eighteenth centuries, an extraordinary production of handwritten books unfolded across the Persianate world, in which calligraphy, illumination, paper, ink and gold were fused into a single, unified visual object. This tradition is fundamental to understanding modern Iranian typography, because it establishes a structural difference from the Latin tradition that inherited Western graphic design.
In Latin typography, letters are conventionally treated as relatively autonomous units, arranged into words and lines like bricks in a wall. Persian-Arabic calligraphy operates on a different logic entirely. The visual identity of a word depends on the relationships among its letters — their connections, their proportions, their rhythm, their position within the overall composition. A letter's shape is not fixed; it changes according to what precedes and follows it, and according to the compositional needs of the page. Consequently, the boundary between typography and illustration becomes unusually porous in the Persian tradition. Iranian graphic design has, since the manuscript era, frequently treated text as a major visual element in its own right, with letters becoming illustrations and words and images intermingling on the page.
This is arguably the single most important principle for understanding Iranian graphic design as a whole. The Iranian designer does not necessarily begin with the assumption that image comes first and text second. Instead, the relationship inverts and interweaves: text as image, image as text. Calligraphy thus becomes not merely handwriting but a coherent system of visual form — one with its own grammar of proportion and rhythm, comparable in sophistication to any typographic system developed later by mechanical or digital means.
Masjed-e Shah
The Tabatabie's House in Kashan is another example of the exquisite use of Iranian graphic design.
Ejeh-ee House in Isfahan
The above panoramic picture depicts the intricacy of compositional juxtaposition of various graphically designed spaces in the Ejeh-ee House in Isfahan. A Safavid period architecture which has been redecorated in Qajar era.
Zinat al Mulk House in Shiraz
Narenjestan e Ghavam is a traditional mansion in Shiraz,that was built in the mid-to-late 19th century by Mirza Ibrahim Khan Qavam. His family of merchants, originally from Qazvin, soon became active in the government during the Zand era. They became prominent during the Qajar dynasty. The Qavam "Naranjestan", with its wall covered mirror-work porch, and elegantly carved wooden doors represents the artisan and craftsmen achievements of the 19th century.
III. PERSIAN CALLIGRAPHY AND THE BIRTH OF TYPOGRAPHIC THINKING
The centrality of calligraphy carries profound consequences for modern design. Persian calligraphic traditions developed sophisticated systems of proportion, rhythm, contrast, density and movement long before the age of print. Nastaliq, in particular, possesses a distinctive horizontal and diagonal rhythm — a script that seems to lean forward and flow across the page — that makes it exceptionally well suited to poetry and literary expression.
This means Persian designers inherited something comparable to a highly developed typographic aesthetic before modern, mechanically reproducible typography itself existed. The historical challenge, then, was not simply to invent a Persian typography from nothing, but to translate a fluid, continuously flowing calligraphic tradition into the mechanical and, later, digital requirements of standardized, repeatable reproduction. This was an enormously difficult problem. Mechanical typesetting in Arabic-script languages developed along a different technical path from Latin typography, and lithography — which could accommodate handwritten forms far more readily than rigid metal type — became correspondingly important in Iran, as will be discussed below.
The deeper design problem can be stated plainly: how can a script whose beauty depends on the continuous, connected movement of the handwritten line be converted into standardized, mechanically reproducible units without destroying the very qualities that make it beautiful? That single question would occupy Iranian designers, calligraphers and type technicians for generations, and it remains, in modified form, a live question in digital Persian type design today.
IV. LITHOGRAPHY AND THE QAJAR TRANSFORMATION
The arrival of lithographic printing in Iran represents one of the most consequential technological transformations in the history of Iranian visual communication. The first lithographic press reached Iran in 1821, bringing with it a technology that could accommodate the manual composition of calligraphy, ornament, caricature and other visual elements far more naturally than the rigid, pre-cast letterforms of movable metal type.
This compatibility was decisive. Because a lithographic plate could be drawn upon directly, a skilled calligrapher — rather than a foreign-trained typesetter — could remain at the center of book and newspaper production, transferring the aesthetic logic of manuscript culture almost intact into the new medium of mass reproduction. Printing thereby transformed the circulation of religious texts, literary works, newspapers, governmental announcements, political commentary, educational material, illustration, caricature and popular literature, in a way that mechanical Latin-style typesetting could not have achieved as smoothly within a Perso-Arabic script environment.
The nineteenth century consequently represents a crucial transitional period: the manuscript culture of the Persianate world began entering the age of mass reproduction without severing its calligraphic roots. The Qajar period also saw an intensifying encounter with European modernity — photography, the newspaper press, new educational institutions, lithographic printing and political journalism together generated new and unfamiliar demands for visual communication. This was the beginning of a long transformation from an ornamental manuscript culture, largely produced for courts, patrons and religious institutions, into a mass-mediated visual culture addressed to an emerging reading public.
Lithograph, Kitāb al-Muṭawwal, by Masʻūd ibn ʻUmar al-Taftāzānī, Tabriz, Iran, Dār al-Ṭibāʻah, 1905
V. PRINTING, NEWSPAPERS AND THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN PUBLIC COMMUNICATION
The development of the newspaper press was particularly important because it transformed visual communication from an elite cultural practice into an increasingly public one. The newspaper created an environment in which typography, illustration, political symbolism and information had to operate together, on a single page, under pressures of speed, cost and legibility that manuscript culture had never faced. Iranian modernity, in this sense, cannot be separated from the development of its press.
The Constitutional Movement of the early twentieth century further intensified the political importance of printed communication. Newspapers, political cartoons, posters, illustrations and visual symbols became instruments through which competing ideas about monarchy, constitutionalism, nationalism, religion and modernity were argued out in public. This was a decisive transition in the genealogy of the Iranian designer. The graphic designer's direct predecessor was no longer simply the court calligrapher or manuscript illuminator, but increasingly the printer, lithographer, illustrator, caricaturist, photographer and newspaper layout artist — figures working under deadline, for a broad and often contentious public, rather than for a single patron.
VI. THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN GRAPHIC DESIGN
Contemporary Iranian graphic design, as a self-conscious professional discipline, emerged in Tehran in the early twentieth century. Tehran University established a Fine Arts section in 1941 with specialized instruction in graphic art and design, and decorative arts education in Iran subsequently absorbed influences from European institutions, including the traditions associated with the École des Arts Décoratifs and with Bauhaus pedagogy.
This institutionalization marked a genuine turning point. Graphic design came to be understood as an independent discipline in its own right, rather than as a subordinate extension of painting or book illustration. The designer now confronted explicitly modern problems that had no real precedent in manuscript or lithographic culture: advertising, editorial design, posters, the visual identity of cultural institutions, film publicity, corporate identity, exhibition design, packaging, book covers and public information campaigns. Iranian modernism in design consequently developed through a direct encounter between Western modernist methodology and Persian visual tradition — an encounter that would go on to produce one of the most distinctive graphic cultures of the twentieth century.
VII. THE GOLDEN AGE: THE 1950s–1970s
The decades preceding the Revolution constitute one of the great formative periods of Iranian graphic design. The first generation of modern Iranian graphic designers absorbed international developments — Bauhaus principles, Swiss International Style typography, Polish poster design, and French graphic education among them — while simultaneously drawing on Persian calligraphy, miniature painting, classical poetry, architecture and ornament as living design resources rather than museum artifacts.
This generation includes figures such as Morteza Momayez, Farshid Mesghali, Guity Novin and Ghobad Shiva, whose collective achievement was not imitation of Western models but synthesis. They faced a genuinely open question: could Iran become visually modern without becoming culturally Westernized? Their work, taken together, answers that question affirmatively — and does so with a fluency that later generations would continue to build upon.
VIII. MORTEZA MOMAYEZ AND IRANIAN MODERNISM
Morteza Momayez occupies a particularly important position in this history. He studied and worked professionally in Iran, later trained in Paris, taught extensively, exercised considerable influence over the professional organization of Iranian design, and absorbed the lessons of Polish poster design at a formative stage in his career.
Momayez's significance, however, extends well beyond any individual poster. He helped establish the institutional identity of graphic design as a profession — and this matters because modern design movements are sustained by more than individually talented practitioners. They require schools, professional organizations, exhibitions, competitions, journals, teachers, students, receptive cultural institutions, and clients capable of understanding what a designer actually offers. Momayez, more than any other single figure, represents the transformation of Iranian graphic design from an individual artistic practice into a professional discipline with its own institutional infrastructure.
Morteza Momayez, Cover for various Periodicals , Circa 1960s  Morteza Momayez, Mythological Antic I, 1961 |
 |
Morteza Momayez, 9th Shiraz Festival of Arts, 1 |
IX. THE IRANIAN POSTER AS A MAJOR ART FORM
The poster became the most visible medium through which Iranian graphic modernism expressed itself. Iranian posters absorbed international modernist conventions but reworked them into a distinctive visual language of their own. The poster offered designers an ideal laboratory precisely because it demanded the simultaneous integration of image, typography, symbolism, poetic allusion, political meaning and cultural memory within a single, immediately legible composition. The Persian poster could therefore function at once as advertisement, illustration, cultural commentary and fine art — categories that, in many commercialized design cultures, remain more sharply separated.
The Iranian preference for cultural rather than purely commercial commissions is particularly significant in this respect. A substantial proportion of Iranian graphic production through this period was associated with cultural institutions — festivals, publishing houses, film and theatre organizations — rather than with consumer advertising. This produced a situation unusual among more thoroughly commercialized design cultures: graphic design in Iran could retain a comparatively strong relationship with intellectual and artistic production, rather than being pulled primarily toward the sale of consumer goods.
X. GUITY NOVIN AND THE EMERGENCE OF WOMEN IN IRANIAN GRAPHIC DESIGN
The history of Iranian graphic design must also include the history of its women designers. Guity Novin's career illustrates this dimension with particular clarity: her employment within the Ministry of Culture and Arts, the institutional resistance she encountered there as a woman working in a field still coded as male, and her subsequent work within the film department, including visual material produced for the first Tehran International Film Festival.
This episode illustrates a broader problem in the history of design generally: modernization does not automatically dissolve gender hierarchy. Women could receive rigorous artistic education and make significant contributions to cultural production while still encountering institutional assumptions about which professional roles were considered appropriate for them. Novin's experience is therefore important not simply as an individual biography but as documentary evidence of the tensions surrounding gender, professionalization and modernity within Iranian cultural institutions of the period — tensions that would only be partially resolved by the much larger participation of women in Iranian art and design in later decades.
 | ||||||
Guity Novin, Negin Magazine Cover, 1972
|
XI. CULTURAL INSTITUTIONS AND THE PAHLAVI ERA
An important feature of pre-revolutionary Iranian graphic design was the role played by cultural institutions willing to commission ambitious, non-commercial work. Kanoon — the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults — is a case in point: an institution centered on children's books and animation that gave designers unusual latitude for creative experimentation.
This mattered because graphic design flourishes most when institutions pose genuine cultural problems rather than simply issuing commercial orders. Book illustration, children's literature, film, theatre, music, festivals and museums all created opportunities for designers to develop sophisticated, layered visual languages that a purely commercial brief rarely permits. The 1960s and 1970s consequently produced a remarkable synthesis of international modernism, Persian heritage, institutional patronage and sustained artistic experimentation — a combination visible in the first major graphic exhibition held in Tehran in 1964 and in the cultural exhibitions that followed it, both of which demonstrate that graphic design had by this point achieved public recognition as a serious artistic discipline in its own right.
 |
| Hooshang Kazemi - c 1965 |
 |
| Hooshang Kazemi, Festival of Art, Takht-e-Djamshid, 1968 |
 |
| Hooshang Kazemi, C 1965 |
 |
| Hooshang Kazemi, C 1965 |
 |
| Hooshang Kazemi, C 1965-1975 |
 |
Ghobad Shiva, Poster for the 5th Shiraz Art Festival, 1971 |
Ghobad Shiva, Poster for the Third World Theater, 7th Shiraz Art Festival, 1973
 |
| Tamasha, Ghobad Shiva, 1973 |
 |
| Tamasha, Ghobad Shiva, 1973 |
 |
| Farshid Mesghali, The Eleventh International Film Festival for Children and Yong Adults, |
 |
| Farshid Mesghali, Poster for Film, Look Again, 1977 |
 |
| Farshid Mesghali, Poster for Film, The Gray City, 1972 |
 |
| Behzad Hatem, Poster for Bijan and Manijeh performed by Iranian National Ballet Company, 1975 |
XII. THE 1979 REVOLUTION: A RADICAL VISUAL RUPTURE
The Iranian Revolution of 1979 transformed the conditions under which graphic design operated. It was, without question, a decisive rupture: many artists left the country, and cultural production became subject to substantially greater ideological regulation than it had known under the previous order.
Yet the historical effect of the Revolution should not be reduced to a simple narrative of "the end of Iranian graphic design." Something considerably more complicated occurred. Graphic design became, if anything, more central to public life — and more explicitly political. Revolutionary posters, murals, political symbols, martyr imagery, religious iconography and wartime visual communication together created an enormous new field for graphic production, even as the state simultaneously attempted to regulate the visual culture it depended upon. The visual language of the Revolution and of the war that followed it should therefore be understood not merely as an interruption of modern Iranian graphic design, but as another chapter within its ongoing evolution — one written under radically different institutional conditions than the chapter that preceded it.
XIII. CENSORSHIP AND THE DESIGNER'S PROBLEM
The post-revolutionary designer confronted a radically altered working environment. Commercial Western imagery could be restricted; cultural institutions were reorganized; certain subjects became politically sensitive; and designers had to learn to negotiate questions concerning religion, gender, politics and public morality with a caution that the earlier period had not required.
This constraint produced an interesting and, in retrospect, historically significant phenomenon. When explicit expression becomes difficult, designers characteristically turn toward metaphor, symbolism, historical reference, visual ambiguity, calligraphic abstraction and allegory — an indirect visual vocabulary capable of carrying meaning past the more literal forms of censorship. Iranian artists and designers, in effect, learned to work within the limits imposed upon artistic expression, and the post-revolutionary environment eventually generated a new generation of designers interested in reconciling Iranian heritage with a modern visual language, but by more oblique and more sophisticated means than before.
This is one of the most important analytical insights in the history of Iranian design: constraint can narrow the field of permissible expression while simultaneously encouraging more sophisticated forms of visual coding — a paradox that recurs, in different forms, across many periods of state-regulated cultural production, and one that Iranian designers of this generation navigated with particular skill.
XIV. THE IRAN-IRAQ WAR AND VISUAL COMMUNICATION
The Iran-Iraq War further transformed Iranian visual culture. War creates an extraordinary demand for images: recruitment, commemoration, mourning, propaganda, national identity, religious symbolism, public information and political mobilization all require sustained visual production, often at great speed and under conditions of scarcity.
The Iranian designer of this period consequently operated within a culture in which the poster possessed enormous ideological weight. The martyr, the soldier, the flag, religious symbolism, calligraphy and revolutionary iconography all became part of an active visual vocabulary. This body of work should not, however, be understood simply as propaganda in the narrow sense. It also became a mechanism through which a society under sustained material and psychological pressure attempted to process trauma, sacrifice, memory and national identity — functions that outlast the immediate military conflict that occasioned them.
XV. THE POSTWAR REVIVAL
The 1990s marked another significant transformation. With the end of the Iran-Iraq War, the maturation of a younger generation of designers, and gradual changes within Iran's cultural institutions, Iranian designers increasingly sought to reconnect international modernism with a distinctly Persian cultural identity — this time from a position considerably more self-aware than that of the first, pre-revolutionary generation.
Reza Abedini stands as the leading figure of this second major movement. His importance lies particularly in his treatment of Persian writing as a modern graphic form in its own right, rather than as an inherited ornament simply inserted into an otherwise Western layout. In Abedini's approach, Persian script becomes a structural component of contemporary design — a crucial distinction that transforms tradition from a decorative quotation into a working design system.
XVI. REZA ABEDINI AND THE MODERN PERSIAN VISUAL LANGUAGE
Abedini's influence is particularly important because of his role as a teacher. A designer who produces a hundred exceptional posters changes the visual culture of his moment; a designer who trains hundreds of designers changes it for generations. Abedini's teaching positions at Iranian universities, and his sustained role in training the generation that followed him, made his influence pedagogical as much as it was creative.
This pedagogical dimension is fundamental to understanding the contemporary Iranian design scene. It is not simply a collection of individual masterpieces produced in isolation, but a genealogy of teachers, students, studios and institutions extending across decades. That genealogy explains why certain approaches to Persian typography, cultural symbolism and poster composition have become recognizable internationally as distinctly Iranian — a visual signature transmitted through classrooms and studios as much as through individual works.
 |
| Reza Abedini, Film Poster, Rêves de Sable, 2003 |
 |
| Reza Abedini, |
 |
| Reza Abedini, |
 |
| Reza Abedini, |
 |
| Reza Abedini, |
 |
| Reza Abedini, Book Cover Design |
 |
Reza Abedini, Moharram, International Conference on Moharram, 1999 |
XVII. THE CENTRAL PROBLEM: HERITAGE VERSUS INNOVATION
Contemporary Iranian designers face an unusual paradox. They possess an extraordinarily rich historical vocabulary — but precisely because that vocabulary is so recognizable, and so readily available, it can become a constraint rather than a resource. As the designer Behrouz Hariri has put it, to be born into a civilization with so immense a cultural inheritance is at once a gift and a burden: the sources of inspiration are almost inexhaustible, yet that very inheritance can make the creation of something genuinely new considerably more difficult than it would be for a designer working without such a weight of precedent.
This is the central problem of contemporary Iranian graphic design, and it resolves into two opposite dangers. The first is folklorization: the designer repeatedly deploys Persian miniature painting, arabesque ornament, traditional calligraphy, carpet motifs and ancient symbols until "Iranian design" hardens into a recognizable decorative stereotype, emptied of genuine invention. The second is cultural erasure: the designer adopts internationalized graphic conventions so completely that the resulting work becomes indistinguishable from generic global contemporary design, forfeiting the very cultural specificity that gave Iranian design its distinctive voice in the first place.
The strongest Iranian design occupies the narrow space between these two extremes. It does not merely reproduce Persian tradition, nor does it discard it. It transforms it — using inherited forms as raw material for genuinely new work, rather than as a fixed repertoire to be repeated or a burden to be shed entirely.
XVIII. DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY AND THE GLOBAL IRANIAN DESIGNER
The internet fundamentally altered this equation. Digital communication enabled Iranian designers to exchange ideas directly with the international design community and to project a different image of contemporary Iran — dynamic, educated, creative and culturally sophisticated — largely independent of the political framing through which the country is often understood abroad.
This is arguably the most consequential transformation of the twenty-first century for Iranian design. Previously, Iranian graphic design reached international audiences almost entirely through exhibitions, books, biennials, professional contacts and international cultural institutions — channels that were slow, limited in reach, and often mediated by institutional gatekeepers. Digital media dramatically lowered these barriers. A poster designed in Tehran could now be seen, within moments of its creation, in London, Paris, New York, Tokyo or Montreal. Online portfolios, social media platforms and digital exhibitions transformed the Iranian designer from a relatively isolated national practitioner into a direct participant in a genuinely global visual conversation — one increasingly conducted in real time.
XIX. WOMEN AND THE CONTEMPORARY IRANIAN DESIGN SCENE
The increasing visibility of women designers is among the most significant features of contemporary Iranian design. Designers such as Homa Delvaray and Zeynab Izadyar, among a growing number of others, exemplify the increasingly important participation of women in Iranian art and design more broadly.
Their work demonstrates that contemporary Iranian design is not reducible to a single stylistic school. It spans experimental typography, poster design, illustration, fashion, cultural identity work, digital media and calligraphic abstraction, frequently produced in international collaboration. The growing participation of women in this field also introduces broader questions of gender, identity and social transformation into the study of Iranian visual culture — questions that a purely formal or stylistic history would risk overlooking. Contemporary Iranian graphic design, in other words, should be read not merely as an aesthetic phenomenon but as a social history expressed through visual form.
 |
| Maryam Rahmati Evini, Film Poster, Rosy-Cheeked, 2002 |
 |
| Maryam Khansari, Film Poster, the Green Dream, 2000 |
 |
| Homa Delvaray, Poster, International Day of Graphic Design, 2005. |
 |
| Homa Delvaray, Book cover design, Iranian Drama: Passion Play, 2009 |
 |
| Homa Delvaray, Poster for Ashoura, 2006. |
 |
| Mariam Enayati, Anti-globalism, 2008 |
 |
| Zeynab Shahidi, Poster, 2005 |
Nasim Shaikh- Harandi
 |
| Nasim Shaikh-Harandi, Let's Hope, 2009 |
 |
| Nasim Shaikh-Harandi, Nations in Peace, 2006 |
 |
| Nasim Shaikh-Harandi,In Memory of Bird! International Day of Environmental Protection, 2006 |
 |
| Nasim Shaikh-Harandi, 3rd Iranian Typography Exhibition, 2005 |
Narges Safaei
 |
Narges Safaei, Molavi, the second Iranian typography exhibition |
 |
Narges Safaei, Beethoven, String Quartet |
XX. THE STUDIO AS A NEW CULTURAL INSTITUTION
Another significant development in the contemporary period has been the emergence of independent design studios. Studio Tehran and Studio Kargah, along with the influence of designers such as Aria Kasaei and collaborators associated with Reza Abedini, exemplify this trend.
The studio has become an important intermediary between the individual artist and the larger cultural institution, allowing designers to collaborate, develop visual identities, organize exhibitions, produce cultural posters, work internationally, teach and publish, all while maintaining an independent artistic practice outside the constraints of a single employer or patron. In this respect, contemporary Iranian design increasingly resembles other global design cultures organized around the independent studio model, while retaining its distinctive relationship to calligraphy and cultural memory that no comparable design culture elsewhere fully replicates.
XXI. MEHDI SAEEDI AND THE EXPANSION OF PERSIAN TYPOGRAPHY
Mehdi Saeedi is an important figure associated with the further development of calligraphic principles applied to typography, including experimentation with Persian characters rendered in zoomorphic and other expressive forms. This work illustrates the continuing, unfinished transformation of Persian script across successive technologies.
The historical sequence can usefully be summarized as a chain of translations: calligraphy, then lithography, then mechanical typography, then modernist typography, then expressive typography, and now digital Persian typography. At each stage, the designer confronts a version of the same fundamental question first posed by the manuscript tradition: how can Persian writing remain recognizably Persian while becoming capable of communicating within new technologies and new visual environments? That question has not been solved once and for all. It remains an active, unresolved field of experimentation, and will likely remain so as new technologies continue to reshape how Persian script is rendered and read.
XXII. THE IRANIAN POSTER AS A GLOBAL PHENOMENON
By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, Iranian poster design had become internationally recognizable in its own right, distinguished by several recurring characteristics.
The first is a strong typographic presence, in which Persian letters occupy the same conceptual territory that illustration occupies in many other design cultures — the letterform itself becomes the primary image. The second is compression: complex cultural ideas are frequently communicated through relatively economical visual structures, rather than through elaborate pictorial narrative. The third is metaphor: rather than relying on literal representation, Iranian designers characteristically employ visual ambiguity, allowing a single image to carry several layers of meaning at once. The fourth is historical memory, in which ancient Persian, Islamic and modern Iranian references can coexist within a single composition without any sense of anachronism. The fifth is the presence of poetry: because poetic language occupies an unusually central position within Persian culture, literary allusion itself becomes a visual design material, quoted or evoked within the composition. The sixth is calligraphic movement, in which the underlying rhythm of Persian writing contributes directly to the kinetic, almost musical character of the finished composition.
Taken together, these characteristics help explain why the Iranian poster in particular has attracted sustained international attention, well beyond what its relatively modest institutional and commercial infrastructure might otherwise predict.
XXIII. IRANIAN GRAPHIC DESIGN AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY
Ultimately, the history of Iranian graphic design is inseparable from the broader politics of identity. Iran has repeatedly confronted questions of what it means to be Persian, what it means to be Iranian, how Iran should relate to Islam, how it should relate to the West, how ancient heritage should coexist with modernity, and how a globalized visual language can coexist with a specifically Persian cultural identity.
Graphic design provides a particularly sensitive arena in which these questions are continually negotiated, precisely because a poster, book cover, logotype or typographic composition is compact enough to be produced quickly, yet expressive enough to carry real cultural argument. The choice between a traditional calligraphic form and a geometric modernist form, in this context, is never merely a stylistic decision. It is, whether the designer intends it or not, a small but legible statement about identity.
XXIV. IRANIAN GRAPHIC DESIGN AS CULTURAL RESISTANCE
One of the strongest conclusions to emerge from this history is that Iranian artistic creativity has persisted through sustained political and economic constraint. Art, in this reading, functions as a form of resistance, memory and cultural duty, and censorship — however extensive — has not eliminated artistic production; it has, at most, redirected it.
This conclusion should nonetheless be stated carefully. Graphic design is not automatically "resistance" simply because it is produced under conditions of censorship; a great deal of Iranian design has served governmental, commercial or straightforwardly institutional purposes, and should not be romanticized as covert dissent when it is not. The more precise and defensible claim is that Iranian visual culture has demonstrated a durable capacity to survive constraint, because its practitioners inherited, from the calligraphic tradition itself, an unusually large repertoire of metaphor, symbolism, historical reference and typographic ambiguity. The very characteristics inherited from Persian manuscript and calligraphic culture — indirection, layered meaning, the fusion of text and image — have repeatedly proven adaptable to conditions under which more literal, illustrative forms of visual communication would struggle.
XXV. A THREE-GENERATION MODEL
The history traced across this chapter can usefully be organized into three major generations of modern Iranian graphic design.
The first generation, that of modernist synthesis, spans approximately the 1950s to the 1970s and is represented by figures such as Morteza Momayez, Farshid Mesghali, Guity Novin and Ghobad Shiva. Their central challenge was to adapt international modern graphic design to Iranian culture, and their answer took the form of a genuine synthesis between Western modernism and Persian artistic tradition.
The second generation, that of post-revolutionary reconstruction, spans approximately the 1980s to the 1990s. Its central challenge was to allow design to survive under significant political, cultural and economic constraint while retaining genuine artistic vitality. Calligraphy, symbolism, cultural memory and metaphor became correspondingly more important as working tools during this period than they had been for the first generation.
The third generation, that of global Iranian design, extends from approximately the 1990s to the present, and is associated with figures such as Reza Abedini, Homa Delvaray, Zeynab Izadyar, Mehdi Saeedi, Aria Kasaei and a growing number of independent studios. Its central question is how Iranian visual identity can participate fully in global design culture without becoming either folkloric, on the one hand, or culturally anonymous, on the other — the same underlying tension identified above in the discussion of heritage versus innovation, now playing out on an international stage.
XXVI. THE LARGER HISTORICAL INTERPRETATION
The history of Iranian graphic design can, in sum, be interpreted as a sequence of technological and cultural translations. Monumental visual communication was followed by manuscript culture; manuscript culture by calligraphy and illumination as an art in their own right; calligraphy by lithographic reproduction; lithography by the newspaper and mass communication; mass communication by modernist graphic design; modernist design by revolutionary and wartime visual culture; wartime visual culture by postwar cultural reconstruction; and postwar reconstruction, finally, by digital globalization.
Each technological transformation forced Iranian designers to reconsider, from first principles, the relationship between text, image, identity and reproduction. This is precisely why Iranian graphic design cannot be adequately described simply as "Persian design influenced by the West." The relationship is considerably more reciprocal and more sophisticated than that formula allows: Iranian designers have repeatedly taken international technologies and visual methods and reinterpreted them through an existing, deeply developed Persian linguistic and cultural structure, rather than simply receiving them from outside.
CONCLUSION: FROM PERSIAN HERITAGE TO A GLOBAL VISUAL LANGUAGE
The history of graphic design in Iran is ultimately a history of continuity achieved through transformation, rather than continuity achieved through preservation alone.
Its roots extend deep into Persian civilization, where visual communication was already highly sophisticated well before the modern era. The Achaemenid and Sasanian empires developed monumental systems of political representation. Islamic manuscript culture transformed writing into an art of extraordinary visual refinement. Persian calligraphy created a tradition in which language itself could become image. Lithography then carried this tradition into the age of mechanical reproduction without severing it from its calligraphic roots.
The twentieth century introduced a further revolution, as Iranian designers encountered European modernism, Bauhaus principles, French education and international poster movements. Rather than simply copying these models, pioneers such as Morteza Momayez, Farshid Mesghali, Guity Novin and Ghobad Shiva helped construct a specifically Iranian modernism — one legible internationally, yet unmistakably Persian.
The Revolution of 1979 produced a profound rupture, followed by political restriction, war, emigration and cultural transformation. Yet Iranian graphic design did not disappear; a new generation gradually transformed constraint into a stimulus for metaphor, symbolism and cultural reinvention. The postwar period then produced designers such as Reza Abedini, whose work and teaching helped establish a new and more structural relationship between Persian calligraphy and modern typography.
The digital age opened a further chapter still. Iranian designers gained direct access to international audiences while simultaneously rediscovering the value of their own cultural inheritance, working now between Tehran and the global design community, between Persian calligraphy and digital typography, between ancient cultural memory and rapidly changing visual technology.
The deepest lesson of this history is therefore not that tradition and modernity stand opposed to one another. It is that tradition, properly handled, becomes the raw material of modernity. Iranian graphic design has repeatedly demonstrated that cultural identity need not be preserved by freezing it in the past; it can instead survive, and even flourish, by being continually transformed. The Persian letter becomes a contemporary image. The ancient symbol becomes a modern metaphor. The manuscript becomes the poster. The calligrapher becomes the typographer. And the cultural memory of several thousand years becomes, in the hands of a new generation, the working visual vocabulary of the digital age.
This, in the end, may be the true international significance of Iranian graphic design: it demonstrates that globalization does not necessarily require visual homogenization. A culture can enter the global design conversation fully, and on its own terms, while continuing to speak in its own visual language.
 |
| Mohammad Djamshidi, Aids is a two-edged knife, 2009 |
 |
| Mohammad Djamshidi, Sport in Islamic Civilization, The International Biannual of Islamic World Graphic Design, 2009 |
 |
| Mohammad Djamshidi, Messenger of love and Friendship, 2008 |
 |
| Mohammad Djamshidi, Rumi's Poem, 2007 |
Farzad Adibi
 |
| Farzad Adibi, Let's Discuss. |
 |
| Farzad Adibi, Poster for Iranshahr Photography Exhibition, 2004 |
 |
| Farzad Adibi, The 2nd. Festival of the Iranian Contemporary Graphic Design, 2009 |
 |
| Farzad Adibi, Poster for the Exhibition of Artist's 'Graphic Art Works- 1999 |
 |
| Faezad Adibi, Book Jacket Design |
Mostafa Asadollahi
 |
| Mostafa Asadollahi, The Second Biennial of Iranian-Islamic Painting ,1995 |
 |
| Mostafa Asadollahi, The 5th Biennial of Contemporary Pottery of Iran, 1996 |
 |
| Mostafa Asadollahi, The 5th Biennial of Iranian Graphic Designers, 1997 |
 |
| Mostafa Asadollahi, Poster for the exhibition of Ghahvehkhaneh Style Painting, 2007 |
 |
| Mostafa Asadlolahi |
Farhad Fozooni,
 |
| Farhad Fozooni, The 22nd Fajr International Music Festival, 2006 |
 |
| Farhad Fozooni, Tehran Symphonic Orchestra, 2006 |
 |
| Farhad Fozooni, The 23rd Fajr International Festival of Image & Scene, 2004 |
 |
| Farhad Fozooni, Poster for Morteza Zahedi's Drawing Exhibition, 2004 |
 |
| Ali-Asghar Nohtadj, 1978 |
 |
| Abbas Sarandj , Misunderstanding, Poster for Theater |
 |
| Poster, Musa Azadi |
 |
| Poster, Musa Azadi |
 |
| Soheil Poonaki, Monajat Nameh, Book cover |
 |
| Siamak Feilizadeh |
 |
| Bijan Seifouri |
 |
| Kourosh Parsanejad |
Bahram Khaef, Film poster, The Intruders, 1976
 |
| Ebrahim Haghighi, Film poster, Wooden Pistols, 1975 |
 |
| Ali-Akbar Sadeghi, Film poster, Zal and Simorgh, 1977 |
Arash Tanhai
 |
| Poster for a Play, 2010 |
 |
| Poster for a concert, |
 |
| Poster for a play, 2011 |
 |
| Poster for a play, 2011 |
 |
| Poster for a writers' workshop, 2013 |
 |
| Poster for a play, |
Sina Afshar,
Mohammad (Sina) Afshar, was born on January 1984 in Mashhad. He has won a number of prestigious awards from various international design festivals.
 |
| Sina Afshar, Three theater posters admitted in 2015 Design Biennal, "Silk Road Spirit" at Shanghai, |
 |
| Sina Afshar, When Crickets Howl, Theater Poster |
 |
| Sina Afshar, Butterfly-ish, Vagabond-ish and Ruined, Theater Poster |
 |
| Sina Afshar ,Resistance Field, Theater Poster |
 |
Mohammad Ehsaee, Calligraphic painting based on a Rumi poem, 2004 |
 |
| Mehdi Haghshenas, Rumi, 2004 |
 |
| Saleh Zanganeh, Culture of the Nations of Iran, 2010 |
 |
| Mohammad Ardalani, Calligraphic Poster, 2010 |
|
T
 |
| Abdolkarim Mousav, Book Jacket Desig |
 |
| Ali Vazirian, Book Jacket Design |
APPENDIX: ANTECEDENTS OF THE POSTER — VISUAL PROCLAMATION IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
Long before the modern poster, ancient societies across Eurasia developed their own methods for placing image and text before a public audience in a fixed location — a function the poster would later inherit and formalize. The rock relief, the inscribed column, the whitewashed announcement wall and the temple frieze together represent an ancient, cross-cultural prehistory of public visual communication, of which the Persian material forms one especially rich strand among several.
Persian rock reliefs recorded the triumphs of the Parthian and Sasanian kings on cliff faces along major routes, ensuring that a political message reached every traveler who passed. Classical Greek cities employed rotating inscribed columns, the axones, to publish the names of victorious athletes and the schedules of games. Imperial Rome used whitewashed walls in its marketplaces, on which merchants, moneylenders and slave traders posted announcements, often embellished with decorative lettering designed to catch a passing eye — an unmistakable ancestor of the commercial poster. Comparable traditions of public image-making developed independently in Egypt and across the Far East.
Among the Persian examples, the Behistun Inscription, commissioned by Darius I in the region of present-day Kermanshah, presents a single text in three cuneiform languages — Old Persian, Elamite and Babylonian — accompanied by a life-sized relief of the king. The inscription was placed high on a cliff face above an ancient road connecting Babylon and Ecbatana, positioned for maximum visibility rather than easy access, in a manner that anticipates the later logic of the strategically sited billboard. The relief of Ardashir I at Naqsh-e Rostam similarly uses a balanced, symmetrical composition — two mounted kings of equal size, framed inscriptions in three languages — to communicate a precise political argument: the legitimacy of the new Sasanian dynasty as heir to the Achaemenid line. The Shapur I relief at the same site commemorates a specific military and diplomatic triumph over Rome, functioning as a permanent public record of victory in the same rhetorical spirit that a modern commemorative poster or monument would serve.
Other reliefs from the wider Iranian plateau register the artistic cross-currents already discussed in the body of this chapter. The Elymaean relief associated with the Parthian king Mithradates I departs from the frontal Iranian convention to depict a horseman in profile, an unusual stylistic choice within the corpus of Parthian rock reliefs. The Heracles relief at Behistun, carved under Seleucid influence and later absorbed into Iranian religious symbolism through the assimilation of Heracles with the divinity Verethragna, illustrates precisely the kind of cross-cultural artistic synthesis that this chapter identifies as characteristic of Iranian visual culture more broadly, here occurring many centuries before the modern encounter with European modernism.
Comparable traditions of public and monumental image-making from beyond the Iranian world round out this appendix and place the Persian material in a wider frame: the trilingual clarity of Behistun finds a parallel in the layered narrative reliefs of Borobudur in Java, whose walls guide the pilgrim through successive stages of Buddhist cosmology; in the Parthenon frieze in Athens; in the Ara Pacis and the Cancelleria reliefs of Augustan and Flavian Rome, both instruments of explicit political messaging; and in the Amarna shrine stela of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, an intimate scene nonetheless designed for public and dynastic display. Each of these traditions, in its own idiom, confirms the appendix's broader point: the poster, in its essential function of placing a durable public message before an audience through the combination of image, symbol and text, is not a twentieth-century invention. It is one of the oldest tools of civilization, and the history of Iranian graphic design begins its true prehistory here, on stone, long before it reaches paper and screen.
 |
| The Behistun Inscription (also Bisitun, Bistun or Bisutun, Old Persian: Bagastana, meaning "the god's place or
land") is located in the Kermanshah Province of Iran.
|
The inscription is approximately 15 metres high by 25 metres wide, and 100 metres up a limestone cliff from an ancient road connecting the capitals of Babylonia and Media (Babylon and Ecbatana). It is extremely inaccessible as the mountainside was removed to make the inscription more visible after its completion. The inscription was illustrated by a life-sized bas-relief of Darius, holding a bow as a sign of kingship, with his left foot on the chest of a figure lying on his back before him. The prostrate figure is reputed to be the pretender Gaumata. Darius is attended to the left by two servants, and ten one-metre figures stand to the right, with hands tied and rope around their necks, representing conquered peoples. Faravahar floats above, giving his blessing to the king. One figure appears to have been added after the others were completed, as was (oddly enough) Darius' beard, which is a separate block of stone attached with iron pins and lead.
The monument suffered some damage from soldiers using it for target practice during World War II. In recent years, Iranian archaeologists have been undertaking conservation works. The site became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2006
This Persian rock relief depicts Ardashir I Coronation scene; as the first king of the Sassanid Empire of Iran, Ardashir receives the ribboned diadem, the symbol of kingship, from the spirit of Darius I of Persia of the Achaemenid dynasty. Ardashir takes the diadem with his right hand, and salutes Darius with his left fist and pointed index finger as a token of respect and obedience (a gesture depicted on many Sassanian rock reliefs). The image design is symmetric, and balanced, and is focused on the daidem. Both kings are on horseback and are of equal size. Under the horse of the King Ardashir lies the last of the Parthian Kings, Artabanus IV of Parthia. Under the horse of King Darius lies Gaumata the usurper, a Magian,. The relief of Ardashir is, therefore, the legitimization of the new Sassanian dynasty by the pre-Alexander Achaemenid dynasty. The inscription in Persian, Parthian, and Greek, reads: ''This is the image of the Hormizd-worshipping Majesty Ardashir, whose origin is of the gods.''
Sassanid king Shapur I of Iran in this relief at Naqsh-e Rostam, celebrats his victories over the Roman emperor Publius Licinius Valerianus , City of Marvdasht , Iran. According to Shapur's records:
"Just as we were established on the throne, the emperor Gordianus gathered in all of the Roman Empire an army of Goths and Gemans and marched ... against us. On the edges of Assyria,... there was a great frontal battle. And Gordianus Caesar perished, and we destroyed the Roman army. And the Romans proclaimed Philip emperor. And Philip Caesar came to us for terms, and paid us 500,000 denars as ransom for his life and becme tributary to us".
 |
| This rock relief is of special interest within the art of ancient Elymais, since the iconography and the style of the figures in the scene are very different: whilst the four standing men in the right half of the relief are depicted in a frontal position and in Iranian dress, the horseman and his attendant in the left half are the only figures among the whole set of Parthian rock reliefs to be depicted in profile. The horseman has been interpreted by many scholars as the Parthian king Mithradates I (141-138 BC), honoured by an Elymaean sovereign –Kamnaskires I – and his retinue. |
 |
| Heracles rock relief at Behistun, Province of Kermanshah, Iran.
According to its Greek inscription, the rock relief representing
Heracles at Behistun was carved in 148 BCE , being dedicated to a local
Seleucid governor. After the collapse of the first Persian Empire
following the Macedonian invasion, following the death of Alexander the
Great, the Greek dynasty of the Seleucids (from Seleukos, former general
of Alexander) were the main rulers of the western part of the Iranian
plate. The Seleucids were dominating the cities and the main commercial
roads, but failed to impose their power in the rural lands. However,
their artistic influence began to penetrate the Iranian plate and will
remain for centuries, through the Parthian then the Sasanian dynasties.
The presence of a statue showing Heracles there testifies such artistic
influence, as for the often seen Greek inscriptions or representations
of Nike in the later carved rock relieves all over the country.
A religious syncretism occurred in Iran soon after the beginning of
the Seleucid dynasty, seen Heracles assimilated with the old Iranian
divinity of power Verethragna. In this relief, Heracles is shown in a
languorous attitude, laying naked on the skin of a lion (probably the
Nemean lion he killed in his 12 labours) , holding a bowl, under the
shadow of an Olive tree. His traditional wood bludgeon and elbow lay
near him. If the topic is typically Greek, either the fashion and
carving technique reveal the relief was carved by some Iranian artist,
unfamiliar with the greek iconography. The main reason was probably
because it was not a royal relief but one of a local person.
|
Relief at the temple Banteay Srei in Angkor, Cambodia, depicting a religious scene.Banteay Srei, is unique among the great temples of Angkor in that it was built not by a monarch, but by a courtier and scholar named Yajnavaraha ("the sacrificial boar"), who served as an advisor and guru to the Cambodian King. It is dedicated in 967 A.D. to the Hindu god Siva. In the middle of the scene stands the ten-headed demon king Ravana. He is shaking the mountain in its very foundations as the animals flee from his presence and as the wise men and mythological beings discuss the situation or pray. According to the legend, Shiva stopped Ravana from shaking the mountain by using his toe to press down on the mountain and to trap Ravana underneath for 1000 years. The east-facing pediment on the southern library shows Shiva seated on the summit of Mount Kailasa, his mythological abode. His consort Uma sits on his lap and clings anxiously to his torso. Other beings are also present on the slopes of the mountain, arranged in a strict hierarchy of three tiers from top to bottom. In the top tier sit bearded wise men and ascetics, in the middle tier mythological figures with the heads of animals and the bodies of humans, and in the bottom tier large animals, including a number of lions.
This shrine stela from the early part of the Amarna Period depicts an intimate family moment of Pharaoh Ankhenaten, his wife Nefertiti, and Princesses Meretaten, Mekeaten, and Ankhesenpaaten worshiping the Aten as a family. While Akhenaten leans forward to give Meretaten a kiss, Mekeaten plays on her mother's lap and gazes up lovingly. At the same time Ankhesenpaaten, the smallest, sits on Nefertiti's shoulder and fiddles with her earring. At the top of the composition, the sun-god, Aten, represented by a raised circle, extends his life-giving rays to the Royal Family.
 |
| Part of the north frieze of the Parthenon at the British Museum in London, from the series of sculptures known as the Elgin Marbles. Designed by Pericles's master sculptor, Phidias, the marbles were part of a monumental frieze that adorned the Parthenon. In 1801, they were removed from the Acropolis by Lord Elgin, then British ambassador to the Ottoman empire. |
 |
| The personification
of Earth. The figure is sometimes identified as Italia, or Italy. The Roman relief
on the east end of Ara
Pacis, or the Altar of Peace, the most
famous example of Augustan art. Altar of Peace, founded on July 4, 13 BCE and completed
on January 30, 9 BCE, was designed as a permanent monument to the most
important accomplishment of Augustus --the bringing of an era of peace.
This was particularly important to the Romans who had witnessed the instability
of the Civil Wars that marked the end of the Republican period. The two children in Earth's lap along with the animals and plants allude to the bounty of earth, especially in an era of peace. She is flanked by female figures with billowing mantles that can be identified as sea and land breezes. . |
 |
| Emperor Marcus Aurelius (161-180 AD) and members of the Imperial family offer sacrifice in gratitude for success against Germanic tribes. In the backgrounds stands the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitolium (this is the only extant portrayal of this roman temple). Bas-relief from the Arch of Marcus Aurelius, Rome, now in the Capitoline Museum in Rome |
 |
| A Cancelleria Relief
The Cancelleria Reliefs, found under the Palazzo
della Cancelleria in Rome in the late 1930s and now in the Vatican Museum, are a
fine example of imperial Roman propaganda art. The setting where they were discovered
indicates that they had been discarded in the late first century.
The figure at the left end of this relief is a lictor. Victory’s left wing is
visible above above his head. The lictor carries a fasces in his left hand, an axe bound
to a bundle of wooden rods. The lictor with his fasces was a symbol of the power
of the emperor to impose punishment of any degree of severity. He probably held
a laurel wreath in his right hand, missing in this relief. The fasces itself,
being comprised of a bundle of rods, indicated strength as a consequence of
unity. Next to the lictor stands Mars, the Roman god
of war, with helmet. In Roman tradition, Mars was the
father of Romulus, who founded Rome.
Next to Mars, in third position, stands Minerva, who flirts
with emperor
Nerva, wearing a long flowing gown beneath an aegis with
gorgon visible below Nerva’s right arm.
Nerva, was chosen as emperor by the
Senate upon the assassination of Domitian, his predecessor. Domitian was the
third emperor of the Flavius family; preceded by his father Vespasian and his
elder brother Titus. Vespasian and Titus were regarded as good emperors. Domitian, however, was tyrannical. Members of the senate were
involved in his murder. Nerva was picked as his successor partly because he had
no family, and thus the risk of dynastic succession was small.
Behind Nerva stand two soldiers in low relief and then the scantily clad Roma,
who nudges Nerva in Minerva’s direction, directing his left hand with her right.
She carries a round shield with a gorgoneion, the image of a gorgon, at its
center. Roma is the personification of the Roman state.
Behind Roma is the head of a soldier in low relief, and then a high relief
carving of a bearded Genius Senatus, carrying a scepter in his left hand. The
acronym SPQR (Senatus Populusque
Romanorum), indicates that the emperor gets his power from the senate and the
people of Rome. The Genius Senatus, or genius of the Senate, then represents the
Senate – not a specific set of people comprising the Senate – but the concept of
a senate in its role in government. The Genius Senatus waves his right hand,
symbolizing his concurrence with whatever is going on between Nerva, Mars, and
Minerva.
To the right of the Genius Senatus (as you view the relief) stands another
soldier in low relief, and then the bare-chested (as usual) Genius Populi Romani,
a representation of the people of Rome, typically paired with the Genius Senatus.
The remaining characters on the right end of the relief are soldiers.
|
Borobudur Temple, Magelang-Central Java, Indonesia
 |
| Prince Siddharta Gautama shaves the hair off his head as the sign to decline his status as ksatriya (warrior class) and becomes an ascetic hermit, his servants hold his sword, crown, and princely jewelry while his horse Kanthaka stands on right. Bas-relief panel at Borobudur, Java, Indonesia. |
 |
| Lalitavistara Deva listening to Dhamma |
 |
| Avadana Level 1, Court Musicians |
 |
| Avadana Level 1, Bowman |
 |
| Jataka Level 1 Bottom, Merchants |
 |
| Jataka Level 1 Bottom, Deva |
 |
| Jataka Level 1, Three Scenes |
 |
| Borobodur Relief |
 |
| Borobodur Relief |
 |
| Borobodur Relief |
 |
| Queen Maya, Borobodur Relief |
 |
| Jataka Level 1, Group Scene |
 |
Lalitavistara, Heavenly Musicians |
 |
| Jataka and Avadana Level 1, Family Scene |
 |
| Lalitavistara, Queen Maha Maya (Māyādevī)
Siddharta Gautama Buddha was born as a Kshatriya, the son of Śuddhodana, "an elected chief of the Shakya clan", whose capital was Kapilavastu, and who were later annexed by the growing Kingdom of Kosala during the Buddha's lifetime. Gautama was the family name. His mother, Queen Maha Maya (Māyādevī) and Suddhodana's wife, was a Koliyan princess. Legend has it that, on the night Siddhartha was conceived, Queen Maya dreamt that a white elephant with six white tusks entered her right side, and ten months later Siddhartha was born. As was the Shakya tradition, when his mother Queen Maya became pregnant, she left Kapilvastu for her father's kingdom to give birth. However, her son is said to have been born on the way, at Lumbini, in a garden beneath a sal tree.
|
 |
| Relief yang ada di candi Borobudur Magelang Jawa Tengah Indonesia |
Go to the next chapter; Chapter 24 - Emergence of the Modern Print, Poster Design, A History of Typeface, and A History of Book Covers
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
No comments:
Post a Comment