The Literary, Thematic, and Aesthetic Roots of the Color of the Day and Night Skies in the Paintings of Sultan Mohammad, The Painter

Iranian old paintings, especially ones which appeared until the beginning of the 11th century AH are one of kinds of illustration marking the authentic Persian poetry and literature. Persian authoritative literary texts were main reason for the fame of ancient Iranian paintings. Under the supervision of powerful kings and rulers, Iranian painters turned important parts of Persian literary texts and poems into paintings. These paintings were placed in the form of illustrations between the pages of books. The most important texts used by Iranian painters included books such as Shahnameh by Ferdowsi. Other books such as Golestan and Bustan by Saadi Shirazi, Lily and Majnoon, Khosrow and Shirin, Haft Peykar, Iskandarnameh and Makhzan al-Asrar by Nezami Ganjavi, Haft Orang by Abdolrahman Jami and Hafez Shirazichr('39')s poetry collection have been sources for other painters. Due to the poetic nature of the texts, these sources introduced the imaginations and daydreams in the minds of Iranians into the painting space. Therefore, many features of Iranian painting are contrary to the real world. The strong link between Persian painting and Persian literature has led to the hypothesis that Iranian art, inspired by the Persian allegories, depicts the sky in a golden or yellow color and night sky in azure color. By this assumption, the study of the colors of the sky in Iranian art and its literary, content and aesthetic roots are the object of the present study, but due to the large number of works of Persian painting, this research has identified these features in the works of one of the most important painters of Iranian history. His name is Sultan Mohammad Painter. Among the works attributed to this artist, seventeen works certainly belong to him, and all of these seventeen works have been selected as examples of this study. By examining the color of the sky in these images and matching colors with narratives about the day or night of the occurrence of events, colors used for day and night skies, two colors of gold and azure were detected. Similarly, in most of the paintings, the full compliance of the writer with the narrative of the text or the followers of the typist from the dominant context of the text, was determined to express the day or night according to the story time which is important and palpable. But in a few cases, the painter who has paid a little or almost no attention to the literary text and relied on his artistic or aesthetic discovery has gone a different way, opposite to these rules; this was the path that came from the lack of awareness of the spaces that led to the creation of images in the halo. This left us left with a historical ambiguity. In this way, the present study, through a descriptive and analytical research and with a quantitative and qualitative approach to the works of Sultan Muhammad, has identified the roots of determining the colors of golden and lazy colors for the heavens in Persian poetry and literature, and the aesthetic criteria of this assignment together with the maximum adherence to the descriptions of literary texts and the minimal compliance of the personal taste of the typographer.