An Artistic Analysis of Qajar Marriage Contracts

Abstract

This research has investigated the decoration of one hundred marriage certificates of the Qajar period. The major aspects of this study were related to the study of layouts, motifs and designs, color, calligraphy and symbolism embedded in motifs and colors. Systematic library search in order to investigate the social and historical pretexts of wording and artwork of the studied documents has been undertaken. Among various visited sites was the Islamic Arts Museum Malaysia that owns five marriage certificates of the Qajar era. The applied artistic research of this work, regarding the scrutinizing the decorative artworks, included the preparation of line drawings for layouts, motifs and actual color palettes. One of the important goals in this research was to identify any possible exclusively used layout, motif, or color in any of the studied documents. Exploring any correlation between the style of illumination and artwork of these documents and their original owner's social class was another goal of this research. Were there any symbolic concepts behind the motifs and colors' Some of the important results of this study can be summarized as follows: Layouts of the studied marriage contracts, obeyed the traditional arrangement of the art of the book, except for 5 of them that belonged to converted Jewish families. Among the floral motifs, rosettes and arabesques were used more, while in geometric motifs, cartouche was the common one. Among the architectural motifs, the dome-shape motif was predominant. Birds depicted in different styles were among the animal motifs, except for one case that belonged to the royal family in which the motif of lions on the two sides of a crown was used. Among the colours, gold, cinnabar and lapis lazuli were the most frequently used ones. Gold was the main colour in the marriage contracts that belonged to the royal families.