Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-321-33431-9
Ph.D.
History of Art and Architecture
Harvard University
2014
The concept of realism in visual representation has been defined and deployed largely within the domain of the Western artistic canon. In the field of art history, the term is often used in ways that depend on implicit, culturally coded assumptions about its connection with the formal markers of optical-naturalism. The Persianate tradition of pictorial representation by contrast, has been traditionally characterized in modern scholarship as stylized and decorative, with little acknowledgment of an interest in realism in its own visual language. Furthermore, normative Euro-centric attitudes have perpetuated the assumption that an engagement with realism entered Persianate artistic practices with the advent of Europeanizing modes of depiction in Safavid and Mughal spheres of production around the late sixteenth-century. This dissertation explores the topic of realism from the perspective of Persianate visual culture. In so doing, it proposes to refine our understanding of the concept in terms that accommodate the varied artistic production of cultures that laid claims to cultivating representational realism in their own primary sources.
Art history; Aesthetics
Philosophy, religion and theology;Communication and the arts;Aesthetics;Cross-cultural exchange;Early modern;Naturalism;Persianate visual culture;Realism