This essay explores the impact of the Shirazi poets Saʿdi and Hafiz on the famous Baroque traveler, Pietro della Valle. Hitherto unexplained features of the magnificent funeral he designed for his Syrian Christian wife, Sitti Maʿani Gioerida, in Rome (1627) can be related to the poets’ tombs he had seen in Shiraz immediately following her untimely demise. In Safavid Iran, Della Valle was impressed by the production of commemorative poetry as well as by the virtuosic calligraphy that functioned as both word and image. He approved of the funerary complexes that created a community of poets both living and dead. The Roman funeral of 1627 not only displayed Della Valle’s literary erudition, it also emulated social, poetic, and artistic elements of the tomb shrines he had seen on his travels.
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See Cristelle Baskins, “Lost in Translation: Portraits of Sitti Maani Gioerida della Valle in Baroque Rome,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 7 (2012): 241–60; Antonio Invernizzi, “Pietro della Valle collezionista in Oriente,” in Il fascino dell’Oriente nelle collezioni e nei musei d’Italia, ed. Beatrice Palma Venetucci (Rome: Artemide, 2011), 53–58.
For Hormuz, see Elio Brancaforte, “Early Modern German Cartographers and Their Representation of the Persian Gulf: The First Two Centuries (1475–1675),” in Cartographie historique du Golfe persique, ed. Mahmoud Taleghani, Dejanirah Silva Couto, and Jean-Louis Bacqué-Grammont (Tehran: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 2006), 145–56; Elio C. Brancaforte, “The Italian Connection: Pietro Della Valle’s Account of the Fall of Hormuz (1622),” in Revisiting Hormuz: Portuguese Interactions in the Persian Gulf Region in the Early Modern Period, ed. Dejanirah Couto and Rui Manuel Loureiro (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2008), 191–204.
See J. D. Gurney, “Pietro della Valle: The Limits of Perception,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 49, no. 1 (1986): 103–16; Sonja Brentjes, “Immediacy, Mediation, and Media in Early Modern Catholic and Protestant Representations of Safavid Iran,” Journal of Early Modern History 13, no. 2 (2009): 173–207; Sonja Brentjes, Travellers From Europe in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, 16th–17th Centuries: Seeking, Transforming, Discarding Knowledge (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, Variorum, 2010); and Elisa Sabadini, “Safavid Persia through Italian Eyes: From Reign of Freedom to Land of Oppression,” in Perceptions of Iran: History, Myths, and Nationalism from Medieval Persia to the Islamic Republic, ed. Ali M. Ansari (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 163–82.
Girolamo Rocchi, ed., Funerale della Signora Sitti Maani Gioerida della Valle, Celebrato in Roma l’Anno 1627, e descritto dal Signor Girolamo Rocchi (Rome: Bartolomeo Zannetti, 1627). On the genre of funeral pamphlets, see Minou Schraven, “The Representation of Court Ceremonies in Print: The Development and Distribution of the Funeral Book in Sixteenth Century Italy,” in News andPolitics in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800), ed. Joop W. Koopmans (Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2005), 47–60. For Della Valle’s attention to non-European fonts, see Rudi Paul Lindner, “Icons among Iconoclasts in the Renaissance,” in The Iconic Page in Manuscript, Print, and Digital Culture, ed. George Bornstein and Theresa Tinkle (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 89–107.
Maclean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 224.
Maclean, The Rise of Oriental Travel: English Visitors to the Ottoman Empire, 1580–1720 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 225.
William Forde, A Sermon Preached at Constantinople, in the Vines of Perah, at the Funerall of the Vertuous and Admired Lady Anne Glover, Sometime Wife to the Honourable Knight Sir Thomas Glover, and then Ambassadour Ordinary for His Maiesty of Great Britaine, in the Port of the Great Turke (London: Edward Griffin, 1616).
See M. Rubens Duval, “Inscriptions Syriaques de Salamâs, en Perse,” Journal Asiatique 5 (1885): 39–62; on page 61, he gives the name of the stonemason; Heleen Murre-van den Berg, “‘An Inheritance with Sarah’: Women in the Church of the East (1500–1850),” Internationale Kirchliche Zeitschrift 100 (2010): 190–208, at 203, with English translation. In general, see Amir Harrak, Recueil des inscriptions syriaques, Tome 2: Iraq: Syriac and Garshuni Inscriptions, 2 vols. (Paris: Académie des inscriptions et belles lettres, 2010).
Chick, Chronicle of the Carmelites, 2:1031. Viaggi, “Letter 5 from Isfahan, 1618,” 1:860. See also Eugenio Galdieri, “Le residenze dei missionari cattolici presso la corte safavide: Nuovi dati sulle case di Esfahan,” in Orientalia Iosephi Tucci memoriae dicata, ed. G. Gnoli and L. Lanciotti, 3 vols. (Rome: Istituto Italiano per il Medio e Estremo Oriente, 1985–88), 2:459–74.
See T. W. Haig, “Graves of Europeans in the Armenian Cemetery at Isfahan,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, July 1919, 321–52, at 349–50; Francis Richard, Raphaël du Mans, Missionaire en Perse au XVIIe siècle (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 138–39; Denis Wright, “Burials and Memorials of the British in Persia,” Iran 36 (1998): 165–73; Denis Wright, “Burials and Memorials in Persia: Further Notes and Photographs,” Iran 39 (2001): 293–98; and Martine Gosselink, “Dutch Graves in Esfahan,” in Iran and the Netherlands: Interwoven through the Ages, ed. Martine Gosselink and Dirk J. Tang (Gronsveld and Rotterdam: Barjesteh van Waalwijk van Doorn & Co., 2009), 154–58.
Rudi Matthee, “The Safavids Under Western Eyes: Seventeenth-Century European Travelers to Iran,” Journal of Early Modern History 13, no. 2–3 (2009): 137–71.
See Mahvash Alemi, “Shiraz: The City of Gardens and Poets,” in The City in the Islamic World, 2 vols., ed. Salma K. Jayyusi et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 1:525–54, at 540.
As noted by Ettore Rossi, “Versi turchi e altri scritti inediti di Pietro della Valle,” Rivista degli studi orientali 22 (1947): 92–98, at 96; and Mario Vitalone, “Il Diario di viaggio in Persia di Pietro della Valle: un confronto con le Lettere,” Annali di Ca’ Foscari, Serie orientale 42, no. 3 (2003): 205–22.
See Lâle Uluç, “The Grave of Saʿdī Shīrāzī as Depicted in Sixteenth Century Shiraz Copies of His Works,” in Essays in Honour of Aptullah Kuran, ed. Çiğdem Kafescioğlu and Lucienne Thys-Şenocak (Istanbul: YKY, 1999), 333–41.
Chick, Chronicle of the Carmelites, 1:614. After having served as part of a wall and paving for a water channel, the tombstone was recognized in 1926. The present location is unknown.
Chick, Chronicle of the Carmelites, 1:442. At that time Ismikhan, also known as Maria Rosa, was a widow with two daughters; a steadfast Catholic, she supported the mission in Shiraz but requested permission to go live in Rome. In 1675, during the persecution of Christians in Safavid Iran, she was fined 50 Tumans.
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This essay explores the impact of the Shirazi poets Saʿdi and Hafiz on the famous Baroque traveler, Pietro della Valle. Hitherto unexplained features of the magnificent funeral he designed for his Syrian Christian wife, Sitti Maʿani Gioerida, in Rome (1627) can be related to the poets’ tombs he had seen in Shiraz immediately following her untimely demise. In Safavid Iran, Della Valle was impressed by the production of commemorative poetry as well as by the virtuosic calligraphy that functioned as both word and image. He approved of the funerary complexes that created a community of poets both living and dead. The Roman funeral of 1627 not only displayed Della Valle’s literary erudition, it also emulated social, poetic, and artistic elements of the tomb shrines he had seen on his travels.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 1209 | 189 | 30 |
Full Text Views | 109 | 5 | 1 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 90 | 13 | 2 |