The 'Shahnama -i Isma`il': Art and cultural memory in sixteenth-century Ira

This dissertation examines the corpus of illustrated manuscripts of the panegyric Shahnama-i Isma`il, a work commissioned by Shah Isma`il himself from the poet Qasimi. While the existence of this poem has been known for some time, the manuscripts have languished largely unappreciated. When the extant manuscripts of the poem are tallied up, though, the evident popularity of Qasimi's panegyric at sub-royal levels indicates a work that struck a nerve in sixteenth-century Safavid culture.;The thrust of the dissertation is to examine this phenomenon using tools from recent developments in the sciences of mind, including cognitive psychology, schema theory, and connectionism. These tools are brought to bear on the manuscripts using a methodology heavily indebted to the Polish philosopher Roman Ingarden's phenomenological approach to artworks, which he analyzes as intentional objects requiring "completion" or activation by the consciousness of the viewer. The essence of this methodology is laid out in Chapter One.;The next two chapters deal with the Shahnama-i Isma`il as a literary work in the context of Persian literature and with its reception in sixteenth-century Safavid culture. The popularity of the Shahnama-i Isma`il is seen to be a function of Shah Isma`il's unusually striking "fit" to the schema of the epic hero as known from the Persian tradition. Other works are compared to Qasimi's epic to demonstrate that combinations of form and content which did not highlight such a match did not achieve the same popularity.;Chapter Four turns to the illustrations proper. The paintings are categorized thematically according to the relations they stand in: painting-to-(external) world, painting-to-text, and painting-qua-(projected) world. This is done in an effort to "take apart" the illustrations and see where in the process of aesthetic interaction the viewers' consciousness would make a contribution(s). Chapter Five, in turn, takes a theoretical turn in accounts for the role of conceptual schemata in the creation as well as the cognition of manuscript illustrations. The Conclusion considers the parallel phenomenon of ssehnamecilik in the contemporary Ottoman Empire and the crucial differences apparent in its approach to myth, history and illustration.