Artworks inspired by Persian poet Nezami shown at Russian museum

Artworks inspired by the Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi have been showcased at the State Museum of Oriental Art in Moscow, Russia.

The exhibition titled on Nezami's subjects, plots, visual works, and Images has been organized to celebrate the 880th birthday of the great Iranian poet.

Some 60 museum items and artworks from private collections, including manuscripts, Persian paintings, graphics and illustrations, are on display at the exhibition, the museum reported.

The museum has called Nezami an Azerbaijani poet. However, he was from Azerbaijan, but his masterpieces have entirely been composed in Persian, without even a verse in the Azerbaijani language.

The artworks represent the truly boundless influence that Nezami’s works have had and continue to have on the fine arts.

The exhibition, which will come to an end on Monday, has been organized to showcase how the humanistic ideas and aesthetic images of Nezami have been perceived and artistically interpreted in the culture of people around the world in the Middle Ages and modern times.

Abu Muhammad Ilyas ibn Yusuf, known as Nezami Ganjavi, was the greatest romantic epic poet in Persian literature, who brought a colloquial and realistic style to the Persian epic.

A rare manuscript of Nezami’s masterpiece Khamseh, which is kept at the Central Library of the University of Tehran, has been registered on UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register list since 2011.

The reputation of Persian poet, who lived during the 12th and early 13th centuries (1141-1209), rests on his Khamseh which is a pentalogy of poems written in Masnavi form (rhymed couplets) and totaling 30,000 couplets.

These five poems include the didactic work Makhzan ol-Asrar (The Treasury of Mysteries), three traditional love stories of Khosrow and Shirin, Leili and Majnun, Haft Paykar, and the Eskandar-nameh.

MG/MG