STORYPHOTOIran’s Fidgety, Cruel Shah Abbas Stars in British Museum Show
Review by Farah Nayeri
Bloomberg
Feb 17 2009
Feb. 17 (Bloomberg) — "Shah Abbas: The Remaking of Iran," a new show
at the British Museum in London, relates the story of an enlightened
despot who was crowned king at age 16 and transformed the face of
his country in the 17th century.
Like the people he ruled over, Shah Abbas was a bundle of
contradictions. He was pious and promiscuous, tolerant and cruel. He
once made a 600-mile (965-kilometer) pilgrimage on foot; yet he served
alcohol at court, and kept an extensive harem.
Shah Abbas, who reigned from 1587 to 1629, gave Armenians their
own quarter, and let swarms of Europeans pitch tents in his main
square. Yet fear of losing his throne led him to kill one of his sons
and blind two others. Observers described him as fidgety. "He finds
it hard to stay still," noted the Italian businessman Pietro Della
Valle on a 1618 visit.
Many of these contradictions are in evidence at the exhibition,
though not his brutality: That’s hard to illustrate through objects,
and wasn’t specific to him at the time, says curator Sheila R. Canby,
author of the instructive catalog.
Much of what you see is on loan from Iran itself and the surprising
array of exhibits includes historic pieces of Chinese porcelain and
Armenian Christian sacred objects.
We get glimpses of the king, with his trademark drooping moustache. One
portrait shows him in a dotted red robe, a silver sword dangling
from his hip. In a second, from a royal album now in the Louvre, he
lounges next to a handsome page boy who pours him wine. Shah Abbas,
we learn, was also fond of males.
Religion, State
As in the British Museum’s two other shows on rulers who made a
difference — Chinese Emperor Qin Shihuangdi and Rome’s Hadrian —
parallels are drawn between then and now. We notice aspects of
Abbas’s rule that resonate with today’s Iran: Shiism brought the
people under a unifying banner, religion and matters of state were
mixed, and shrines were built or rebuilt.
Where Shah Abbas and modern Iran part ways is that the 17th-century
sovereign, a pragmatist, flung his doors open to Westerners to bolster
trade. He even appointed a pair of English adventurers named Robert and
Anthony Sherley as his envoys; Robert, wrapped in a cape and turban,
is pictured in an unsigned 17th-century canvas, and in a 1622 Van
Dyck sketch.
To ground his reputation as a devout king, Shah Abbas spent large sums
endowing and rebuilding the Shiite shrines where his forefathers were
buried. The magnificent 1,192-piece collection of China, elements of
which are in the show, was displayed in tailor-made niches inside
a wall of the mosque at Ardabil. (The porcelain appears, somewhat
comically, in a painting of dervishes drinking, washing, sleeping
and praying.)
Big, Bold
What emerged through the gifts and artistic commissions was a Shah
Abbas style, exquisitely illustrated in the show. The arabesques and
lotus blossoms seen on carpets or book bindings are bigger, bolder
and bulkier. A palette of peach, light blue and green is preferred
to the dark reds and blues of the past. Gold and silver seep into
carpets and other fabrics.
Shah Abbas’s greatest aesthetic legacy, the beautiful city of Isfahan,
is shown in a slow-motion video on tall walls put up halfway through
the show. These dizzying turquoise-blue visions help transport you
to the place where you really need to go in person to measure Abbas’s
cultural impact.
The London exhibition, through its narrow, scholarly focus on Abbas’s
bequests to holy shrines, deliberately avoids the kind of sweeping
overview that its predecessor "Hadrian" provided. Yet every object
within it, given time and attention, speaks of Shah Abbas in its own
subtle way, and repeats the enduring message of a man whose vision
of Iran still prevails.
"Shah Abbas: The Remaking of Iran" is at the British Museum,
London, from Feb. 19 through June 14. For more information, go to
http://www.britishmuseum.org.