Engelbert Kaempfer was a German physician who traveled to Persia with a Swedish embassy in 1683. He is best known, in Persia, for his descriptions of the court of Shah Abbas II and of Persepolis, where he was the first person to identify the inscriptions as a form of writing.
He lodged in Isfahan for nearly 20 months (29 March 1684 to 20 November 1685) – during which time he carried out a methodological survey of the town. The most famous of his drawings of Isfahan is his Planographia, a birdseye axionometric drawing of the city, which has been used by many scholars to help fix the location of various palaces and other buildings.
I’m going to show you something else here: his drawing of the “Great Messczit” (Shah Abbas I’s great Mosque on the Maidan); and his sketches of the buildings along the west side of the Maidan (the Ali Qapu).
In the manuscripts, Kaempfer writes in a mixture of German and Latin which is very difficult to read (for me, anyway!). But a printed translation writes of how the Safavid maidan: “is surrounded by two-storeyed vaulted buildings with recesses. The upper floors are divided into small rooms that are rented out as dormitories for all sorts of foreigners as well as prostitutes. The ground floor of this arcade serves partly as a covered walk for pedestrians but in the main to accommodate spacious bazaar stalls for shopkeepers and craftsmen who produce and sell a variety of goods there.”
He also mentions something I have not seen described anywhere else: “On the . . eastern side one’s eye is caught by the exceedingly elegant Mosque of Shaykh LutfAllah, which is covered in gleaming tiles, as well as by a hall along the walls of which the curious viewer is presented with mechanical figures in warlike poses, which for a few small coins will enact vivid scenes”.
Does anyone know of any other accounts of this?
Did the Lotfollah mosque really have minarets at its entrance in the 17th century?
V good point, Yolande! I was trying to put my finger on the something-odd about the drawing! And this is it! Maybe he got the two mosques mixed up?
Of course Masjid Shah has minarets (Robert Byron photo here: http://archnet.org/library/images/one-image.jsp?location_id=3697&image_id=211284)
while Lotfollah does not (1960s photo: http://archnet.org/library/images/one-image-large.jsp?location_id=3698&image_id=109638)
This does bring into question the accuracy of everything else he did. Eg the famous Planographia
Thankyou!