Please join us for a talk entitled "The Iconography of the Tetramorph in Spanish and Persian Manuscripts" by Saeideh Ghasemi at the Jordan Center for Persian Studies
Date: Thursday, October 3, 2024
Time: 6:00 pm
Location: Humanities Gateway #HG 1010
Abstract: Medieval manuscript illustrations often offer valuable insights into traditional, peculiar, and enigmatic artistic representations. This talk will explore the iconographic similarities between Spanish and Persian manuscripts, specifically focusing on the symbolic figures of the tetramorph—four winged beings with human bodies and the heads of different creatures: a human, a bovine, a bird, and a feline. The focus will be on the manuscripts of The Wonders of Creation by Zakariya Qazvini and the Corpus of Beatus of Liébana. We will explore these winged, human-bodied hybrids and how they recur in both Western and Eastern texts and art.
Saeideh Ghasemi holds a Ph.D. in Persian Language and Literature from Allameh Tabataba’i University in Tehran. In 2018, she served as the director and professor at the Jayyam Iranology Center at Nebrija University in Madrid. From 2019 to 2021, she was a visiting researcher at Complutense University of Madrid where she focused on comparative research between Persian and Spanish literature. Currently, she is dedicated to researching Persian manuscripts in Spain and teaches classical Persian literature at the Autonomous University of Madrid. Additionally, she curated the Persian manuscripts collection at the National Library of Spain and authored a catalog of the library's antique Persian manuscripts.