Abstract
Naqsh-i Jahan Square lies at the heart of the Safavid Empire's capital city of Isfahan, and it is a remarkable unified artistic statement that renders legible Shah 'Abbas' imperial ideology in the urban landscape. It is also a complex made up of many different buildings with theater iconography: the caravanserai, coffeehouse, maydan, and palace. Though there is much existing scholarship analyzing these buildings separately, this paper proposes a new holistic conception of these stage spaces as linked and hierarchal. The stages embody the Shah's goal of centralization by facilitating ease of movement to promote urban consolidation and they invite the Safavid subject to become an actor in the imperial project through their in-the-round design, while containing dissent through the visual supremacy and exclusivity of the palace stage. Taken as a whole, the square's translated name, 'Image of the World' holds true, and this paper demonstrates how Shah 'Abbas' tiered theater spaces cast Naqsh-i Jahan Square as both a microcosm and a macrocosm of the Safavid Empire.
Highlights
Scholars have identified an iconographic connection between the Safavid maydan and the theater,[1] the Safavid coffeehouse and the theater,[2] and the caravanserai as an origin point for Safavid theater architecture.[3]
It is noteworthy that all of these types of theatrical structures are present within Naqsh-i Jahan Square in the Safavid’s capital city of Isfahan, a building complex known for its architectural unity (Fig.1),[4] and all Sussan Babaie, Kathryn Babayan, Massumeh Farhad, Ina Baghdiantz-McCabe, and Christoph Werner, Slaves of the Shah: New Elites of Safavid Iran, (London: Touris, 2004), 85; Babak Rahimi, “Maydān-I Naqsh-I Jahān: The Safavid Isfahan Public Square as “A Playing Field”, in In the Presence of Power: Court and Performance in the Pre-Modern Middle East, edited by Pomerantz Maurice A. and Vitz Evelyn Birge, 42-60, (New York: NYU Press, 2017)
The visual iconography of the square reflects its theatrical function, and like Safavid theaters it heavily resembles the inn-yard of a caravanserai, with its two-story squared portico and water feature (Fig. 5 and 6).[12]
Summary
Scholars have identified an iconographic connection between the Safavid maydan (city square) and the theater,[1] the Safavid coffeehouse and the theater,[2] and the caravanserai (inn for travelers) as an origin point for Safavid theater architecture.[3]. Empire In-the-Round: The Tiered Stages of Naqsh-I Jahan Square in Isfahan
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