The Italian Cultural Institute and the l’Union des écrivaines et des écrivains québécois, in the occasion of the series of encounters “La Piazza – letteraria” that have the pleasure of inviting you to the conference “The Sasanian rock reliefs: Birth and development of a craft tradition”, by Pierfrancesco Callieri, professor of Iran’s pre-Islamic Archeology at the Department of Cultural Heritage of the Alma Mater Studiorum Bologna.
Thursday June 29, 2017 at 7pm
Maison des écrivains
3492, avenue Laval, Montréal
R.S.V.P. Stéphanie Lemétais ecrivez@uneq.qc.ca 514.849.8540
The subject of the Sasanid rock reliefs, because of its wealth of themes and iconographic motifs, is one of the artistic areas that have concentrated the activities of researchers from the early stages knowledge of Iran Sasanid era. Large panels of monumental indeed have aroused the interest of the first Western travelers, to whom we owe a valuable documentation of these artistic testimonies. They are one of the most eloquent archaeological evidence regarding the art of Sasanid rulers, as the Kings of Kings of the buildings were not preserved like decorative device to those Pasargadae, Susa and Persepolis in the Achaemenid period. Obviously, the aspects that initially have drawn the energy of the researchers were mainly the interpretation of the represented motifs and the identification of the characters animating the scenes, the latter being rarely supplemented by inscriptions. Through comparison with the monetary portraits, the Sasanid rulers are always represented with a personal crown and identified by a legend, it was relatively easy to identify the ruler over much reliefs, and thus to provide interpretations for the various scenes.
However, it is difficult to interpret figurative language in its complexity: one, expressed by posture, hairstyles and attributes of characters, had been clear for contemporaries of these rock art but often seems enigmatic to modern observers in the absence of explicit references. Despite numerous studies on the subject, we are still far from reaching an overall consensus on many of the aspects of Sasanian rock reliefs, both in terms of pure iconography thematic or aspects of iconographic interpretation and research relating to the codes of expression of this art. The conference aims to propose a state of the art on rock reliefs and to present a better understanding of the codes of expression, visual communication and the mechanisms of artisanal production as well as their functions of mythisation of history. The conference is the result of original research that the author conducted on the archeology of the Sasanid Iran since 2001 on the sidelines of his fieldwork in Iran (where mainly periods Achaemenid and post-Achaemenid) to contribute to the resolution of the many interpretative questions that remain unanswered, and that allowed him to give in 2014 at the College de France Iranian studies Conferences and Ehsan Latifeh Yarshater
Pierfrancesco Callieri is professor of archeology of ancient Iran at the University of Bologna, Ravenna branch. He is primarily interested in the archeology of Iran and pre-Islamic Central Asia, the period Achaemenid to the Sasanian period, especially the dialogue between Hellenism and cultures of Iranian and Indian worlds. He has focused his research on two geographic areas: on one side the northwest of the subcontinent between India and Pakistan, and the other Fars (southern Iran). Since 2005, he is the Italian director of the Joint Archaeological Mission Iranian-Italian which worked in Fars on the sites of Tang-e Bolaghi, of Pasargadae (Tol-e Takht) and Persepolis (Persepolis west and Tol-e Ajori ), where excavations continue. Since 2015 he is chairman of the Societas Europaea Iranologica. In 2017 he received in Iran the 8th Farabi International the Award for Iranian Studies.
Reservation no longer available