The Visual Order of the Promenade: The Chaharbagh of Safavid Isfahan and its Sensory Experiences

Based on his recently published book, Isfahan: Architecture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Iran (Penn State University Press, 2024), Farshid Emami offers a fresh account of the architecture, sensory landscape, and visual structure of the Chaharbagh, a four-kilometre-long, tree-lined promenade that served as the primary venue of urban leisure and processional ceremonies in Isfahan, the cosmopolitan capital city of the Safavid Empire in early modern Iran. Drawing on historical visual sources, Persian-language poetic descriptions, European travel narratives, and on-site fieldwork, the talk will recreate the experience of the Chaharbagh from the viewpoint of a moving beholder, reconstructing the now-vanished pavilions, landscape elements, coffeehouses, and Sufi convents that engendered a carefully choreographed sequence of aesthetic, social, and sensual pleasures along the promenade. Striking a delicate balance between a grand setting for ceremonial processions and an enticing public arena for leisurely strolls, the Chaharbagh created a novel urban setting for individual and collective social experiences.
Farshid Emami (Ph.D., Harvard University, 2017) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Rice University. He specialises in the history of architecture, urbanism, and the arts in the Islamic lands, with a focus on the early modern period and Safavid Iran. His scholarly interests include global histories of early modernity, social experiences of architecture and urban spaces, interactions of architecture and literature, and patterns of cross-cultural exchange in the Persianate lands and beyond. In addition to his publications on Safavid art and architecture, he has written on topics such as lithography in nineteenth-century Iran and modernist architecture and urbanism in the Middle East.
This event is organised by Professor Sussan Babaie, Professor in the Arts of Iran and Islam.