A Comparative Study of Architectural Decoration in the Baysonghori Shahnameh and Ibrahim Mirza's Haft Awrang Paintings

Baysonghori Shahnameh and Ibrahim Mirza's Haft Awrang are two prominent works of Iranian paintings that have been illustrated in the great Khorasan region for more than a century, but almost in a geographical area. Given that, buildings' decorations are worn out and destroyed over time, the illustrated manuscript containing buildings can serve as a visual document to identify architectural-related decorations in a geographical area. The questions that arise are, what is the position of the architecture and its decorative elements in the paintings? What are the similarities and differences in the architectural decoration of these two editions? The purpose of this research is to compare architectural decorations in two versions of painting indexes in Khorasan with more than a century interval. This research was a descriptive-analytical and comparative study and the data was gathered by the library research method. Six of the 22 paintings of the Baysonghori Shahnameh and 12 of the 28 Haft- Awrang architectural paintings were selected by purposeful sampling. The results show that the importance of architectural monuments in the Baysonghori Shahnameh is greater and the full screen is devoted to visualization of the building, but in the Haft Awrang paintings, the building is often part of the image and formed in combination with the natural elements. The inscriptions of the Baysonghori Shahnameh are the major element of the architecture of the building. But in the Haft Awrang they have a simple structure and are mostly decorative. The variety of colorful geometrical and plant motifs is more visible in the Haft Awrang. In the Haft Awrang wall paintings have a more prominent place, but in the Baysonghori Shahnameh the wall paintings are much dimmer.