A Comparative Study of Tree Images in Sohrab Sepehri’s Paintings and Poems from the Perspective of Panofsky’s Iconology

Poetry and painting are two different paths for creating works of art, and their close relationship has always been of interest to art history researchers and literary critics.Sohrab Sepehri is an artist who tested his taste in both poetry and painting.Therefore, using purposive sampling of Sepehri's paintings of trees and his Hasht Ketab (Eight Books) poems, and based on Panofsky's theory of iconology, the present research is a comparative study of these works.It focuses on the images of trees in his poetry and painting to analyze and explain various structural and semantic aspects of common icons to discover the characteristics and connections between his poetic world and his art of painting.The current research tries to answer the questions of why and how the tree image acts differently in the two linguistic and visual systems.Sepehri's approach to the 'tree image' in both poetry and painting is contrasting in such concepts as dynamism and staticity, life and death, rootedness and rootlessness, fertility and infertility, openness and closure, and disconnection and connection, while it is sometimes approaching in themes such as strangeness and the sense of suspense.The results showed that Sepehri is under the influence of the paradigm of modern Iranian painting in drawing the image of the tree and its space, in which the space is mainly contracted, dark, and desperate.Hence, the trees in his works move in the direction of disconnection from the world and the essence of existence which can be an allegory of Sepehri's objective world.However, the image of the tree in his poems is in line with the dominant common concepts -a symbol of growth, freshness, and vitality -which is far from the rhetorical signs and the uncommon domain of connotation in Persian literature.It is, in a way, an explanation of the ideal world of the poet .