Q. & A. 711 to 1707 with solved Papers css 1971 to date

The Palace Complex at Ispahan
The Meidan is shown with its plane trees and canal bordered to the west by two monumental gates. The surviving gate on the right is the Ali Kapu, with its talar draped in awnings. From the gates, walled alleys, in part open and in part covered by domes perhaps serving as bazars, both link and divide various enclosures. Just to the right of the Ali Kapu appears a small centrally planned Masjid for the use of the palace, then isolated in a court but now engulfed by later structures. In the upper right of the print appears the Chehel Situn with its garden and to the upper left the Hasht Behisht within the Garden of the Nightingales. Above, at a contrasting angle, is the beginning of the Chahar Bagh with its canal and fountains.
The Ali Kapu
The Kapu or High Gate was much more than the main entrance to the palace. A very tall structure of three principal and two intermediate stories, it served as the major reception pavilion, the selamlik of the palace, and is said to have been the favourite abode of Shah Abbas. The raised talar with its ivvan facing the Meidan served as a summer throne room, banqueting hall, and reviewing stand. Although the results of structural examination have not yet been fully published, the plan suggests that Shah Abbas enlarged an originally cruci form pavilion with iwans and square corner rooms. This nucleus, which may have been Timurid, probably stood in the middle of ti square Chahar Bagh since obliterated, in part by the widening of the Meidan in 1509-10.’
Chehel Situn
West of the Ali Kapu, the Chehel Situn still stands within its original garden. Hoag suggest that Shah A )bas may have laid out the
tdlbotRiL
slamic Art P 237
The Architecture of the Savavid Empire 797
garden as early as 1590 but built only the western portion of the edifice, which consists of iwans, facing east and west flanked by small chambers in two stories and leading to the great triple-domed reception hall of about 79 by 36 feet. Rising the full height of the building, its vaulting, between heavy transverse arches, recalls the system adapted by the II Khanids and the Trimurids. There may already have been talars in antis north and south of this block. According to a recently found inscription. Shah Abbas II added the twostory blocks behind the great eastern talar and the porch itself in 1647 2
The decorative scheme of Shah Abbas’s structure survives in part within the north and south talar. There, in the shallow niches, are found paintings in a European style (they are framed in wholly Persian arabesque, however). The painting of the vaults of the great hall and its adjoining chambers is also early. In the latter, recently cleaned wall paintings show on a large scale the style of the court miniaturist, Raza Abbasi (1575-1634), who probably designed them if he did not actually pain them, although persons in Western dress appear, the European style of the exterior paintings is absent. Despite the fact that they record events of the reign of Shah Abbas, the enormous murals in the great hall, themselves restored more than once, probably date at the earliest from the restoration conducted under Shah Sultan Hussain, since several windows were filled in to provide space for them.
What part ceramic played in the ornament of the Chehel Situn in uncertain, though, as at the Ali Kapu, the spandrels of the arches of the west facade are picked out in tile mosaic against the exposed buff birds. Their figural subjects are identical in style and contact to the paintings in the manner of the aforementioned Raza Abbasi, but they are much more mechanical, even repeating the same figure in various colors.