Chester Beatty Annual Lecture 2022 - Faces and Façades: Walking the City of Isfahan

In the seventeenth century, Isfahan was seen as amongst the most cosmopolitan cities in Asia. Nothing like Isfahan, Istanbul, Delhi, or Beijing was found in Europe. Designed entirely out of vast open spaces which were until the 1590s outside medieval urban walls, the new Isfahan, with its royal precinct and suburban palaces, its public places of social life, commerce, and religion, and its mansions and houses, became famously dubbed as ‘Isfahan, half the world’. It naturally followed that if you have not seen Isfahan, you have not seen half the world! This year’s Chester Beatty annual lecture, by Sussan Babaie, Professor the Arts of Iran and Islam at the Courtauld Institute of Art, takes us to Iran, to see Isfahan through the faces and façades of the city.

This lecture is part of the events programme related to the current exhibition, Meeting in Isfahan: Vision and Exchange in Safavid Iran.