Comparative study of decorations and executive techniques in the wooden grave box of Sheikh Safi al-Din Ardabili and Shah Isma’il I Safavi

Sheikh Safi al-Din Ardabili and Shah Isma’il I Safavid grave boxes are from the wooden works of Timurid and Safavid eras respectively. Their current location is the tomb of Sheikh Safi al-Din Ardabili, located in Ardabil. These two grave boxes provide a context to implement various decorations of geometric, herbaceous, petroglyphs, and wood-related techniques, that their identifying and analyzing in the artistic field is an important and necessary matter, in addition that by investigating these decorations, the artistic discourse of the mentioned eras can be achieved that had a mutual interaction. The purpose of the study is to identify the decorations and the executive techniques in both of the grave boxes, and also matching and comparing with each other. The research questions of this study are; What are the structural and artistic parts of the mentioned grave boxes? What are the similarities and differences between them? This study uses the descriptive-analytical and comparative method, that its approach is based on the structuralism approach regarding the methodology, that both grave boxes are analyzed and investigated regarding the form structure and decoration. The results of this paper show that the form structure and decorations of Shah Isma’il’s grave box are affected by the structure and decoration of Sheikh Safi’s grave box, and they are also affected by the dominant ideology in the Safavid era, thus it was implemented more detailed than Sheikh Safi’s grave box.