A Comparative Study of Text and Image in the Coffee House Paintings of the Battle of Rostam and Ashkobus

Portraying the Shahnameh stories and especially the story of the battle of Rostam and Ashkobus is one of the common subjects of the coffee house painting. In illustrating stories, artists create their works by referring to the original text of the story and relying on their imagination and the artistic knowledge of the past. Accordingly, the comparative study of text and image in the coffee house paintings of the battle of Rostam and Ashkobus as one of the important stories of the Shahnameh seems necessary. Knowing how the scene of the battle of Rostam and Ashkobus is represented through coffee house painters, identifying the degree of conformity of the paintings with the poems of the Shahnameh, and identifying the similarities and differences between the samples and the poems of the Shahnameh are among the objectives of this article. The present research is a theoretical study and has been conducted with a descriptive-analytical method and comparative approach, and the library, documentary and image information has been analyzed with a qualitative method. Case examples of the research include 6 works of coffee house paintings by Hossein Qoller Aghasi, Hossein Hamdani, Mansour Vafaei, Hassan Esmailzadeh and Mohammad Farahani.