Word: shahs
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Isfahan's artistic flowering began with the reign of the energetic Shah Abbas I, who made it his capital. As Anthony Welch explains in his excellent catalogue, Shah Abbas transformed the traditional Persian arts, previously the province of a tiny, cultivated elite, into a more widely based, commercially successful venture. He was a generous patron, who took a personal interest in the production of anything that added to the glory of his reign. Isfahan was so completely his creation that his corrupt successors did not significantly change the outward shape of his society. Yet their dissipation ate away...
SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY Isfahan was more than a city--it was a dream. Travellers marvelled at its mosques and bazaars, which nothing in Europe could rival, and many a drafty northern castle was adorned with the glowing carpets for which Isfahan was renowned. Shah Abbus and The of Isfahan, at the Fogg until February 24, recreates the magic of the fabled Persian city with a rich and varied collection of beautiful objects from tomb covers to archer's rings...
NEARLY EVERYTHING in the exhibition has a shimmering insubstantiality to it. A pale orange silk prayer rug with silver and green blossoms, which may have belonged to the Shah himself, looks as if it would have crumbled to dust if he had ever knelt on it. Though they are lethal weapons, his damascened swords and daggers are inlaid with golden flowers and lines of flowing script. The astrolabe looks more like an extravagantly ingenious toy than a working navigation instrument. Even the coins of Isfahan look too pretty to spend...
...FOGG, Shah'Abbas and the Arts of Isfahan...
...succeeded, it would lock the West for long years into paying for its oil high prices that might not hold up in an open market. Anyway, the oil producers for the moment show little interest in settling for any price other than the highest they can get. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi of Iran has said that a fixed price for oil would be acceptable only if the West could also guarantee fixed prices for the goods that it sells to oil producers -an obvious impossibility in view of global inflationary trends...