-

The role of European art, and even more to the point, of European artists in seventeenth century Safavid art has yet to be properly evaluated.
Principally, this is because there is very little contemporary documentation on the subject, despite the travelers through whose writings
we are otherwise so well informed about seventeenth century Isfahan. The Europeans are maddeningly vague and brief their artist countrymen, nevertheless, there are a few references to western European artists practicing in Persia at various times in the seventeenth century that maybe mentioned here,
although we must note that they exist, for the most part, as disembodied names to which no relevant oeuvre can at this point be attached. And although Safavid painting of this period was far from ignorant of European art, it has so far rarely been possible to document the precise European source of a composition or a motif in a Safavid painting of this period . In this article we turn to consideration of what European painters contributed to the arts of seventeenth century Isfahan .Knowledge of the
European manner of painting also came to Isfahan through the work of several artists trained outside Persia. A painter named Minas is said to have studied with an European.