Persian Gardens and Pavilions: Reflections in History, Poetry and the Arts: v. 43
Author(s): Mohammad Gharipour (Author)
Publisher: I.B.Tauris
Publication Date: 30 April 2013
Language: English
Print length: 256 pages
ISBN-10: 178076121X
ISBN-13: 9781780761213
Book Description
From Timur’s tent in Samarqand to Shah Abbas’ palace in Isfahan and Humayun’s tomb in Delhi, the pavilion has been an integral part of Persianate gardens since the Achaemenid garden in Pasargadae in the sixth century BC. Here, Mohammad Gharipour places both the garden and the pavilion within their historical, literary and artistic contexts, emphasizing the importance of the pavilion, so overlooked in the study of Iranian historical architecture. He does so by examining the representations of gardens and pavilions in religious texts (such as the Zoroastrian Aban Yasht or the Qur an), the poetry of major Persian poets (such as Ferdowsi, Sa di, Rumi and Hafez), miniature painting, sculpture and carpets, as well as accounts of travellers to Persia. Gharipour thereby highlights the spiritual, symbolic and religious aspects of gardens, as well as their more social and economic functions, reflecting patterns of patronage and ownership. This book reaches back through Persia’s rich history to explore the relationships between human beings and their domestic environments and will be a valuable resource for Art History, Architecture and Iranian Studies.
Editorial Reviews
Review
In this book, Mohammad Gharipour does an excellent job of examining the historical, religious, literary and artistic importance of Persian gardens and pavillions. But unlike other explorations of the garden, he focuses on the relationship between architecture and gardens rather than just offering analysis of the gardens themselves. The product of years of dedicated research, it successfully studies and compares three types of documents to uncover the symbolic,metaphorical and historic importance of gardens in the Persian tradition, from the early Zoroastrians to the sixteenth century.
Professor Attilio Petruccioli, Professor of Landscape Architecture, Polytechnic University of Bari
Mohammad Gharipour develops a line of scholarship in art and architectural history that has largely been ignored by contemporary scholars. Although the Persian garden underlies the basic garden form in the Western world from the third to the seventeenth century CE, the role of the pavillion in these gardens forms a conspicuous absence in the literature. Through detailed examinations of both visual and textual media, this book represents a major contribution to our knowledge in the field of garden art and architecture, linking the development of the chaharbagh to its later descendants through the Islamic World and beyond. –Douglas C. Allen, ASLA, Professor of Architecture Emeritus, Georgia Institute of Technology.
About the Author
Mohammad Gharipour is Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, Morgan State University in Baltimore. He obtained his Master’s in architecture from the University of Tehran and PhD in archtecture and landscape history at Georgia Institute of Technology. As the recipient of the Hamad Bin Khalifa Fellowship in Islamic Art and the Spiro Kostof Fellowship Award from the Society of Architectural Historians, Gharipour has published extensively on architectural history. He is the editor of ‘Bazaar in the Islamic City’ (2012) and the founding editor of the ‘International Journal of Islamic Architecture’.
Wow! eBook
