Victoria & Albert Museum reviewing 5,000 years of Iranian art

London's Victoria & Albert (V&A) Museum has been reviewing 5,000 years of Iranian art during a program titled ‘Epic Iran’.

“Exploring 5,000 years of art, design and culture, ‘Epic Iran’ shines a light on one of the greatest historic civilizations, its journey into the 21st century and its monumental artistic achievements, which remain unknown to many,” the website of the museum has written.

The V&A’s luxury tour delivers quite brilliant recreations of Iran’s two most renowned sites, Persepolis and Isfahan. Persepolis and Isfahan are dazzlingly brought to life in the blockbuster show that explores five jaw-dropping millennia of cultural history, from soaring domes to charging horses.

‘Epic Iran’ shows there is a cultural history that connects the country as it is today with the people who lived here five millennia ago. To put this in perspective, that’s like telling the story of Britain from before Stonehenge to the present and hoping it all connects up somehow. But in Iran, it does.

That’s partly because of a pride in history that preserved traditions across the millennia. The most important document of that is ‘The Shahnameh’ (The Book of Kings), written at the start of the 11th century CE by the poet Ferdowsi whose epic is packed with the heroic deeds and bloody battles of the ancient Sasanian Empire. There are gorgeous manuscripts of this classic. A masterpiece made in Tabriz in the 1500s for the Safavid ruler is open on a battle scene in which bejeweled horsemen charge each other across a sea-like expanse of blue: the painter takes time to depict little flowers blooming on the battlefield, just before the horses trample them.

A pottery jug in the shape of a humpbacked bull from 1200-800 BCE, a golden bowl from the same period with exquisite 3D gazelles bursting from it, and many more horned and frolicking beasts fill the earliest art here with animal life. An armlet has horned griffins on it, in gold, lapis lazuli and other precious stuffs.

The Persian Empire is brought to stately, ceremonial life in one of the exhibition’s big set pieces. Real treasures such as a spindly gold model of a chariot and huge horn of plenty drinking vessels are displayed among ever-changing virtual images of Persepolis, as it was and is now.

Persepolis was built for rituals and tribute ceremonies, not living in: its mystique soaks in as you watch a cast of its sculptures change color to show how it was originally painted. Yet even here there was room for artistic delicacy. A real chunk of the reliefs of Persepolis, lent by the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, shows one courtier touching his friend’s beard in a gesture of intimacy: the other reciprocates with a similarly warm tap on the shoulder.

The ruler Cyrus the Great speaks for himself on the Cyrus Cylinder from the British Museum, a clay roll incised with cuneiform letters telling how Cyrus has restored religious rights in his empire.

The artistic richness of Iran has to have come from its geographical openness to east and west, absorbing influences from China, Mesopotamia, Greece, and the Mongols. That gives Persian Islamic art a subtle strength that in turn influenced the whole Islamic world.

This artistry went into overdrive when the Safavid Empire united Iran behind Shia Islam in the 1500s.

The exhibition was opened in May and will continue running until September 12 at the V&A.

MG/MG