From late 16th century onward, Iran drew the growing attention of Europeans and, as time went by, the number of Europeans traveling to Iran increased, to such an extent that, by the mid 17th century, the capital of Iran - Isfahan — hosted visitors from nearly all regions of Europe. Although the foreign population of Isfahan during the 17th century was almost exclusively male, on the basis of secondary oral and visual sources a general notion was prevalent that images of Farangi women were in great demand. The importation of images of European female nudes in print and paint, beginning around 1600, may have sparked enthusiasm for Iranians to depict the European woman.
The Farangi woman (zan-e farangi) herself, was an object of desire, too, appearing in some Iranian literature of the 17th century. As Amy Landau describes below, long before the Western Orientalists, the Safavids eroticized and sexualized European females. "The Safavid evidence reverses the traditional orientalist 'East-West' dialectic in which the 'East' is understood as the passive feminine recipient of the gaze belonging to the all-powerful masculine "West/ In other words, the eroticized and exoticized woman has been discussed as an orientalist motif, generally under the rubric of the odalisque, the ubiquitous sex slave and object of male sexual fantasy. Images of reclining women in the seraglio or staged in another domestic setting are theorized as objects upon which the Western male projected his fears, anxieties, and desires.
Much literature has been dedicated to building this argument within the historical context of Western imperialism and the power imbalance between Europe and America, on one hand, and Asia on the other. The Safavid material seriously questions our assumption of who sexualizes and mythologies whom and suggests highly permeable and constantly shifting boundaries of the erotic and exotic 'other.' The evidence presented in this article leaves little doubt that the Safavid male subjugated the European female to his own gaze long before Western imperialism."
Orientalist taste introduced a Western audience to a permissible world of fantasy: exotic scenes of people of North Africa and the Middle East, occupying a picturesque world that was novel and different from their own, with different social rules. In Iran, Occidentalist taste played a similar role: exciting images of an alien people showed a fascinating and foreign social environment. In both cases, this imagined alien world reflected in some way on the viewer's own home environment, confirming prejudices, exciting forbidden desires, or offering a critique of the status quo.
Forbidden Cultural Hobbies in Early Modern Persia
