Chapter 4 Sleeping under the Hazardous Dome of the Sky
An Intertextual Study of Representation of Corporeality in Seventeenth Century Architecture and Poetry of Safavid Isfahan
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Abstract
This chapter focuses on the emergence of a new type of relationship between urban humans of the Safavid period (1501–1722), especially the citizens of the capital city of Isfahan, and their environment and explores a turn towards materiality and contingency in different forms of artistic production, including architecture and poetry. While the mystical poetry of previous periods mourns human’s separation from the Garden of Eden, the poets of the Isfahani style, the dominant style of poetry in the Safavid period, have an anguished yet content look at the physical world with no reference to a relieving eternal metaphysical refuge. In parallel, the thematics of the inscriptions of religious buildings of the time, especially mosques, start to concentrate on material phenomena and physical natural objects and incidents. While environmental hazards were only one amongst many engaging factors that made influence on human activities and the artistic productions of the period, this chapter suggests that the resonance between the epigraphic content of religious architecture of the Safavids and the widely criticised, seemingly unprecedented secular poetry of the Isfahani style might imply how natural hazards and consequential disasters shift the focus of early modern Iranian humans from the realm of non-tangible to tangible and corporeal – despite the religious Safavid state.