In the preface of L’Art de l’Iran (1962; The Art of Iran), André Godard presents Iran’s past as “imperfectly known.”Footnote 1 Until the rise of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1925, he suggests, Iranian art was accessible mainly through minor objects preserved abroad. European travelers followed fixed caravan routes and faced either a narrow selection of monuments or closed religious buildings, attributed to “popular indifference” and “fanaticism.”Footnote 2
Within this division, the past appears fragmented, inaccessible, and resistant to historical comprehension, whereas the present is the moment when Iran’s artistic history opens to systematic documentation and organization. This contrast does not merely describe change, but rather establishes a temporal hierarchy in which the present gains the authority to observe, order, and interpret what had remained hidden. Historical knowledge is therefore situated within a privileged “now,” from which the past can finally be brought into view.
This historical shift is inseparable from Godard’s institutional position and the political reconfiguration of historical knowledge in early twentieth-century Iran. Trained as an architect at the École des Beaux-Arts in the 1910s,Footnote 3 Godard had gained practical experience in archaeological and historical research in Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, and Afghanistan before arriving in Iran.Footnote 4 In 1929, he was appointed director of the Edāreh-ye ʿAtīqāt,Footnote 5 coinciding with the Pahlavi state’s abolition of France’s archaeological monopoly and its broader effort to reorganize the past through new institutions and laws. The foundation of Anjoman-e Āsār-e MellīFootnote 6 in 1922Footnote 7 and the reorganization of the Edāreh-ye ʿAtīqāt under the Antiquities Law of 1931Footnote 8 reflected a similar narrative of historical reordering: one that positioned Iran’s past as a domain in urgent need of identification and classification from the privileged point of the present, thereby placing it under direct state supervision and protection.Footnote 9
Godard belongs to a generation of early twentieth-century European researcher-archaeologists who contributed to shaping national art histories through fieldworks, museums, and heritage institutions. Writing history for this generation was not only scholarly description, but also an act of ordering, stabilizing, and narrating the past with the near-exclusive institutional authority these historians held at the time. This article names such historical orderings “periodization,” and examines how they actually operate in L’Art de l’Iran. Rather than serving as a neutral descriptive tool, periodization operates here as a strategic narrative device through which a long historical sequence is organized, tested, and stabilized. By determining which elements of the past become visible, comparable, and meaningful, Godard’s periodization actively produces continuity as the organizing principle of Iranian art and architecture.Footnote 10 This article shows that continuity in Godard’s account is not a neutral historical finding, but the outcome of a carefully staged strategy of periodization that both stabilizes and strains Godard’s narrative.
Continuité liée au plateau: Grounding Continuity before History
Godard’s periodization begins by securing continuity before dynastic history, anchoring it in geography rather than political chronology. He announces his mission as the attempt to “trace the continuous line of Iranian art,”Footnote 11 seeking to locate this line beneath successive layers of “foreign modes and influences.”Footnote 12 Initially, he finds continuity rooted in what he describes as le plateau iranien:Footnote 13 a geographic and material condition that provides the basis for artistic and architectural formation.Footnote 14 Yet this framing is not neutral, even at this initial stage. By grounding continuity in this elevated geography, regions that are geographically distinct, most notably lowland plains such as Khuzestan, are automatically left outside, thereby delimiting in advance which regions can participate in the narrative of continuity.
This selectivity becomes even more pronounced in the way continuity is further substantiated. Godard repeatedly locates early artistic production within the material conditions of the Zagros region, treating its specific climate and topography and its access to stone and water as formative constraints.Footnote 15 Through this emphasis, he suggests that the plateau shapes Iranian art from what he terms its “primitive” phase onward.Footnote 16 Geography, confined to the material conditions of the Zagros, functions as a selective ground: certain forms emerge because the land makes them possible, whereas others never arise at all. Within this framework, prehistoric art is presented as an internally generated development, moving from stone to bronze in parallel with shifts in subsistence and settlement.Footnote 17 This material grounding of continuity is reinforced through symbolic persistence, as recurring motifs tied to survival and fertility reappear across periods, from early ceramics to Achaemenid metalworks and later Sasanian animal art.
At this stage, continuity is already secured through two strategies of periodization: first, by anchoring it to the land, thereby establishing continuity prior to dynastic chronology; and second, by tracing the persistence of certain forms and motifs across historical periods. This grounding, however, functions only as the opening move. Land and symbolic persistence stabilize continuity, but they do not yet produce the compelling historical tension required to animate Godard’s narrative.
Challenges, Threats, and a Theatric Stage of Survival
To stage the first dramatic scene, dynastic history enters the narrative as a potentially disruptive layer to continuity, within an already stabilized framework. The Achaemenid period is therefore positioned as a moment of exception, with its monumental architecture, most notably Persepolis and the Palace of Susa, interrupting the previously established rhythm of gradual development. This disruption is explained not merely by unprecedented scale, but by the explicit hybridity that structures the architectural production of the period. Godard repeatedly insists on multinational composition of Achaemenid building sites, carefully listing the origins of craftsmen, materials, and techniques drawn from across the empire.Footnote 18
Rather than hiding the “disparate elements”Footnote 19 that he identifies in the Achaemenid period, Godard actively uses them to intensify the tension. Difference functions not as a problem to be resolved, but as a structuring element that challenges continuity without interrupting it. Although the Achaemenid monuments are executed through disparate elements, Godard insists on the presence of a unifying architectural coherence that allows the historical line to continue. Persepolis, he argues, is not an accidental assemblage, but a “perfectly coherent and homogeneous ensemble,”Footnote 20 made possible by a guiding architectural authority capable of transforming diversity into coherence.Footnote 21
Neither absorbed without tension nor treated as a full rupture, the Achaemenid period is positioned as a managed challenge within Godard’s narrative. Periodization here operates as a strategy of controlled differentiation: difference is acknowledged and emphasized, only to be reordered within a stable narrative frame. Through this maneuver, continuity is not simply preserved but also actively produced, revealing that Godard’s strategy of periodization stabilizes the continuous line of Iranian art by staging moments of challenge that render continuity both visible and credible.
If the Achaemenid period enters Godard’s narrative as a managed challenge, the Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian periods activate a more dramatic periodizing logic. Continuity no longer appears on the stage as something openly tested or immediately secured. Instead, it recedes, survives in suspension, and returns only later with renewed forces. This dramatic interval opens with the Seleucid period, which Godard frames as the moment when continuity is visibly threatened by foreign forms rather than internally challenged. The Seleucid rulers, as Godard states, “persisted in considering themselves as Greeks in the midst of Iranians,”Footnote 22 reorganizing space through imported urban frameworks rather than through Iranian forms generated by the plateau.Footnote 23
Yet within Godard’s strategy of periodization, this Hellenistic phase is carefully diminished in historical weight. Further, he insists that Seleucid monuments are “extremely rare on Iranian soil,”Footnote 24 and even that the few surviving ones, such as the temple in Kangavar, appear only in a “degraded Greek style.”Footnote 25 Rather than contributing to the continuous line of Iranian art, these remains function as evidences of an unfavorable and ultimately a temporary foreign influence.
Godard’s periodization simultaneously includes and marginalizes the Seleucid period, relegating its monuments to historical residue rather than structural contribution. Continuity is not broken within this period, but displaced, withdrawn from visibility and preserved as a hidden force awaiting reactivation. Following this displacement, the Parthian period enters Godard’s narrative not as a clear recovery of continuity, but rather as its cautious and uneven reappearance. Although authority returns to Iranian rulers within this period, as he claims, continuity does not yet return to full artistic and architectural visibility. Instead, it resurfaces beneath what he characterizes as “a Hellenistic garment.”Footnote 26 Introducing a hierarchy between surface and structure, appearance and the core, Godard employs this metaphor to relegate Hellenistic form to the level of an external and historically removable covering, while reserving architectural authenticity for the underlying Iranian logic of construction. The Hellenistic appearance, exemplified in columns and decorative motifs, functions as an external envelope, whereas the underlying constructive principles remain Iranian. At sites such as Assur and Hatra, the monuments may look Greek, but in Godard’s reading they are driven by what he calls “authentic works of Iranian construction:”Footnote 27 visible above all in vaulting techniques, spatial organization, and the early articulation of the iwan.Footnote 28 By displacing continuity from visible surface to construction through Godard’s strategy of periodization, he is able to sustain the continuous line of Iranian art and architecture in his narrative even when it appears foreign.
Taken together, the early dynastic periods form a deliberately staged tension within Godard’s narrative, in the interplay of an internally managed challenge, an external threat that displaces continuity from visibility, and a prolonged interval in which continuity survives beneath a foreign garment. Continuity is neither broken nor passively preserved; it is tested, withdrawn, masked, and strategically deferred. Periodization therefore functions as dramaturgy: Iranian art moves offstage, survives in hiding, and waits for a later return. It is precisely this delayed reentry that prepares the Sasanian period to appear as the moment when continuity can finally step back into full historical visibility.
A Return to the Surface: Reactivating Continuity in the Sasanian Period
Continuity reenters Godard’s narrative under the Sasanians, not as a discovery but as a carefully staged return. What had been displaced during Seleucid domination and sustained beneath a Hellenistic cover is now allowed to regain historical visibility. This moment is not presented as the emergence of a new artistic or architectural order, but as the end of a prolonged suspension during which continuity was conceptually preserved while remaining partially withdrawn from full expression.
Godard frames this transition as the moment when “Iranian civilization once again resumes the government of its empire.”Footnote 29 This statement does not merely describe a political shift. It signals the restoration of the conditions under which continuity can operate openly and coherently. Periodization here does not introduce a new artistic or architectural order; rather, it reauthorizes visibility. What had endured beneath the surface now appears as dominant, legible, and structurally decisive in art and architecture.
This logic closely resonates with a conceptual model that Godard himself explicitly invokes: Henri Focillon’s understanding of artistic life as a river capable of withdrawal and resurgence.Footnote 30 In this perspective, forms do not disappear when they cease to dominate the visible field; they persist beneath historical surfaces and reemerge when conditions change. Similarly, Iranian artistic and architectural principles are not reinvented or rediscovered; they resurface. The Sasanian moment marks the point at which the current of art and architecture, long constrained and partially submerged, is able to rise again to the surface of history.
This renewed visibility is exemplified through a set of architectural forms that Godard presents not as innovations, but as confirmations of continuity. Vaulted spaces, domed chambers, axial halls, and especially the chahār-tāq (a four-arch architectural unit) structures are presented as elements that had “[only] disappeared under a surface,”Footnote 31 lacking the political and symbolic conditions necessary for full articulation.
In Godard’s construction of the Sasanian moment, Fīrūzābād and Sarvestān serve as evidentiary anchors for a continuity he had previously displaced beneath foreign surfaces. It is here that vaulting, domes, and axial spatial organization can be reclassified as unmistakably Iranian and granted unambiguous narrative authority. In his strategy of periodization, this clarity is not explained as technical innovation. Rather, Godard presents it as the result of a historical reconfiguration: forms that had persisted under conditions of concealment or constraint are now shown to operate without obstruction. By marking the Sasanian as a return to authentic Iranian rule, Godard is able to reposition these constructional practices from subordinate or muted roles into organizing principles of monumental architecture. What changes, in this account, is not the repertoire itself, but the conditions under which it becomes fully legible and authoritative.
Yet at this point, a certain vagueness enters Godard’s narrative. If continuity can withdraw, survive beneath the surface, and later reappear with full authority, what exactly sustains it across historical shifts? Although Godard initially anchors continuity in material conditions (land, construction habits, and the persistence of forms), that grounding does not always remain fully stable. At crucial moments, that continuity, carefully safeguarded by his periodization, is no longer secured by material evidence alone; it is instead attributed to an immaterial principle: an artistic or spiritual life, variously described as the “artistic sensibility of the people,”Footnote 32 the “very soul of the people,”Footnote 33 or “the sacred fire”Footnote 34 of Iran said never to go out, despite historical and political changes.
These terms function less as defined concepts than as sporadic explanatory placeholders, allowing continuity to be sustained implicitly at the moments when it can no longer be historically specified. Godard never clarifies the nature of this immaterial force, leaving continuity suspended between material persistence and an undefined spiritual agency. This unresolved tension, previously managed through such implicit appeals, becomes decisively exposed when his narrative turns to Islamic Iran, in which a newly articulated spiritual universe confronts the continuity that his periodization has preserved to this point.
Islamic Iran: A Flattened Millennium
What distinguishes the Islamic period in L’Art de l’Iran is not simply its relatively long historical span, but the way this span is deliberately treated as a single, internally flattened field. Centuries of dynastic succession (Umayyad, Abbasid, Seljuk, Ilkhanid, Safavid) are acknowledged, yet they no longer generate the kind of dramatic tension that structured earlier phases of the narrative. Dynasties and empires are named, but they no longer function as turning points reorganizing the historical narrative. Islamic Iran instead appears as a condensed historical block, one in which internal differentiation is muted so that continuity can be tested against Islam itself.
At this point, the question shifts from whether continuity can survive political change to how it responds to a new religious universe that claims spiritual authority of its own. Godard defines Islam at its origin as an immaterial phenomenon, a formulation that might seem to introduce a challenge to the continuity he has carefully preserved. Yet what Godard attributes to Islam is neither a collective soul nor a cultural spirit of the kind he had previously invoked to sustain continuity. It is rather a “moral principle,”Footnote 35 excluded from the sphere of artistic and architectural formation.
Godard characterizes Islam through the figures of its early agents, the Arab conquerors, whom he explicitly describes as lacking any established practice of visual or architectural production.Footnote 36 He reduces their architectural capacity to the Kaʿba, described dismissively as “nothing more than an enclosure of low walls covered by a light roof of palm branches.”Footnote 37 Islam may impose a new religious framework, but it is denied any capacity to reimagine or reorganize the artistic and architectural field, which remains governed by preexisting Iranian forms and constructive logics.
This new strategy of periodization allows Godard to absorb the Islamic conquest into his narrative without disruption. The transition from Sasanian to Islamic Iran, despite its political and religious significance, is presented as producing no artistic challenge. Pre-Islamic and Islamic monuments are repeatedly treated as evidences of a shared continuous fundamental spatial vocabulary, articulated through “the same iwans and the same domes,”Footnote 38 and explicitly reinforced by the claim that nothing essential changes in architecture itself: neither “the construction, nor the forms, nor even the plan.”Footnote 39
Neutralizing the whole Islamic period as an effective force becomes Godard’s final strategic move in tracing and securing the continuous line of Iranian art. Once religious shifts and dynastic succession are presented as inconsequential, the continuous line is finally allowed to extend without any tension. The long Islamic period unfolds as a stabilized duration in which forms persist through repetition and refinement, yet gradually show a loss of generative capacity. From the end of the Safavid era onward, as Godard shows, artistic and architectural production continues increasingly as reiteration rather than innovation. Forms are preserved, elaborated, and maintained, but their ability to generate new imaginations steadily diminishes. In this sense, Godard’s periodization constructs continuity by establishing a symbolic bridge between pre-Islamic Iran and later historical moments: one that passes over the Islamic centuries rather than engaging them as a formative historical field.Footnote 40
What remains unresolved is how this gradual exhaustion can coexist with the premise that underpins Godard’s narrative. Continuity, as he argues, is not a mechanical survival of forms, but the expression of a spirit, a soul, or better put, a living force capable of retreat, concealment, a return. Yet in the Islamic period, this force no longer shows to act productively. Continuity seems to persist without renewal, and Godard offers no satisfying explanation for why a principle endowed with vitality should culminate in repetition rather than invention.
Conclusion
Reading L’Art de l’Iran through the lens of periodization, the book appears less as a precise historiography than a carefully staged drama in which continuity plays the central heroic role, repeatedly facing challenges, withdrawn, or hidden, yet always successfully returning to the light. In this sense, periodization not only divides time into understandable sections; it also orchestrates a sequence of dramatic trials through which continuity is made to endure.
For Godard, continuity is not a descriptive outcome of historical evidence, but a narrative achievement: one that must be actively protected, displaced, marked, and reactivated through carefully calibrated temporal divisions. By allowing disruptions and challenges to appear only as moments to be overcome, Godard’s narrative leaves little room for other historical trajectories, effectively excluding forms, practices, and temporalities that cannot be made to fit the narrative of continuity.
This reading invites both specific and general questions: How might periods such as the Seleucid era appear if approached not as brief interruptions but as constitutive historical moments? And what histories remain invisible when geographically distinct regions such as the Khuzestan plain are excluded from the spatial framework of Iranian art? How different might Iranian art and architectural history appear if written through alternative modes of periodization that do not privilege continuity as their only guiding principle? What kinds of architectural or artistic histories emerge when rupture, suspension, or multiplicity are allowed to remain unresolved?
Although this article opens the door to a critical reading of Godard’s constructed narrative of historical coherence, further work could extend this perspective by examining how similar strategies of periodization operate across other historiographic texts of the early and mid-twentieth century, and how these temporal frameworks are shaped by political, institutional, and epistemic conditions of their moment.
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