The angel Surush rescues Khusrau Parviz in a Safavid Shahnameh painting made in Tabriz, Iran, circa 1530–35

Angels or Pari? How to Read Winged Figures in Persian Art

A winged figure floats above a pavilion, enters a royal story at the moment of crisis, or decorates the border of a poetry manuscript. It is tempting to call every such figure an “angel.” In Persian art, however, wings do not identify a single kind of being. The image may represent an Islamic angel, the Iranian figure Surush, a pari, a heavenly companion, or an intentionally ambiguous emblem of beauty.

That ambiguity is part of the pleasure of Persian painting—but it also means that the safest interpretation begins with the manuscript’s text, not the wings alone. This guide explains the main categories and offers a practical way to read them.

Why do winged figures appear in Persian art?

Persian painters worked with several overlapping traditions. Pre-Islamic Iranian ideas continued to circulate; Islamic scripture and storytelling supplied angels with specific duties; epic and romantic poetry populated the world with marvelous beings; and artists borrowed and transformed visual conventions that had traveled across regions for centuries.

The result is not a single, fixed “Persian angel” type. Winged figures can be messengers, rescuers, guardians, inhabitants of paradise, supernatural beauties, or decorative presences. Their identity depends on the story, accompanying text, attributes, and setting.

This is one reason a general introduction to Persian miniature painting is useful: these works were often made as pages in books or albums, where image and written word were designed to be read together.

Islamic angels: fereshteh and malāʾika

The everyday Persian word fereshteh (فرشته) means “angel.” In Islamic contexts, angels—Arabic malāʾika—are spiritual beings who carry out divine commands. Manuscript paintings may identify a particular angel through the episode being illustrated: Gabriel appears in narratives of revelation, Israfil is associated with the trumpet, and the Angel of Death appears in stories about mortality and judgment.

A striking example is a mid-sixteenth-century Falnama, or Book of Omens, folio in the National Museum of Asian Art. Its catalogue identifies the scene as the Angel of Death slaying Shaddad and records that the work was made in Qazvin, Iran. Here the manuscript’s subject makes the figure’s identity far more precise than its wings do.

Angels can also shift a painting’s emotional register. In Sultan Muhammad’s illustration of a Hafiz poem, the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that angels perched above a tavern pavilion help turn an earthly drinking scene into an image of spiritual enlightenment. The same visual device can therefore connect narrative, poetry, and mystical metaphor.

Surush: an Iranian figure with a long history

Surush—also written Soroush, Sorush, or Surosh—is especially important because he joins pre-Islamic and Islamic Iranian traditions. The Avestan name Sraosha is connected with hearing and obedience. Encyclopaedia Iranica describes Sraosha as a major Zoroastrian yazata whose popularity helped preserve him in Islamic Iranian culture as the angel Surush.

In Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh, Surush can appear as a heavenly helper. The featured image for this article illustrates a dramatic example: “The Angel Surush Rescues Khusrau Parviz from a Cul-de-sac,” a folio from the celebrated Shah Tahmasp Shahnameh. According to The Met’s object record, Khusrau is trapped while fleeing Bahram Chubina, prays for help, and is carried to safety by Surush. The painting is attributed to the Iranian artist Muzaffar ‘Ali and was made in Tabriz around 1530–35.

Calling Surush merely a generic angel loses something important. He is a named character whose roots reach deep into Iranian religious history and whose later image belongs to Persian epic storytelling.

What is a pari?

A pari (پری), often spelled peri in English, is not simply the Persian word for an Islamic angel. Its history is more complicated. The older Avestan pairikā referred to a class of dangerous female supernatural beings; Encyclopaedia Iranica traces the term through Old, Middle, and modern Iranian languages. Over time, the figure changed dramatically in Persian literary and artistic imagination, becoming an exceptionally beautiful, fairy-like or celestial being.

Museum catalogues sometimes describe paris as “angel-like” because they are winged and heavenly in appearance. That resemblance is real, but the categories should not automatically be collapsed. A pari belongs to Persian mythic and poetic vocabulary, while a named angel in a religious or epic episode may have a distinct identity and function.

The Met’s Safina, or anthology of Persian poetry, makes the distinction especially clear: the museum describes the manuscript’s winged figures as angel-like creatures known in Persian as pari. The manuscript was copied by the Iranian calligrapher Sultan Muhammad Nur in 1499–1500, and its delicate stenciled figures animate pages of lyric poetry.

Heavenly companions, beauties, and deliberately blurred identities

Some works resist a clean label. The National Museum of Asian Art’s Garden of Heavenly Creatures, probably made in Iran in the mid-sixteenth century, shows winged figures dancing, playing music, and serving food and wine in a garden. The museum’s label calls them angels and says they are referred to as huris or paris in Persian.

That double terminology is useful evidence, not a problem to be “corrected.” Persian painting often places heavenly beauty, garden celebration, poetic love, and spiritual longing in the same visual field. A viewer may be invited to see more than one register at once.

Likewise, the Met’s seventeenth-century Gathering of Mythical Creatures around a Lotus Leaf combines an angel with fantastic animals. The signed drawing by Iranian artist Mu‘in Musavvir was made in 1677 and copies an earlier Persian model. It reminds us that artists also delighted in visual invention: not every supernatural figure serves a theological lesson.

How to tell an angel from a pari in a Persian painting

There is no foolproof checklist, but these five questions produce a much stronger reading than appearance alone:

  1. What text does the image illustrate? A Shahnameh, Qur’anic story, omen book, lyric anthology, and independent album drawing create different expectations.
  2. Is the figure named? A museum record or manuscript caption may identify Surush, Gabriel, Israfil, or the Angel of Death.
  3. What is the figure doing? Delivering revelation, rescuing a king, sounding a trumpet, entertaining in a garden, or simply ornamenting a border points toward different traditions.
  4. What attributes accompany it? A trumpet, sword, halo or flame, throne, musical instrument, or specific narrative setting can matter more than wings.
  5. How cautious is the catalogue? Terms such as “angel-like,” “heavenly creature,” and “possibly” signal genuine uncertainty. Preserve that uncertainty instead of turning a visual guess into a fact.

Why Persian winged figures look so beautiful

Persian painters often rendered supernatural beings according to ideals of elegance rather than strangeness. Flowing scarves echo the curve of wings; gold catches the light; patterned garments link the figure to the manuscript’s decorated page; and youthful faces embody beauty without necessarily fixing gender in modern terms.

Those choices make winged figures visually at home beside courtly lovers, musicians, gardens, and poetic gatherings. Their beauty can mark them as belonging to another realm, but it can also make the boundary between earthly and heavenly love deliberately porous.

A motif to enjoy—and read carefully

Winged figures are among the most memorable details in Persian art precisely because they carry several histories at once. Some are angels in clearly identified Islamic narratives. Surush preserves a particularly Iranian religious and epic lineage. Paris travel from older, darker origins into the radiant world of poetry and painting. Other figures remain productively between categories.

If you enjoy this visual tradition, the Persian Miniature Jewelry Box — Floral Cypress & Angel Motif brings a winged, garden-like miniature composition to an everyday keepsake. The historical lesson is worth carrying with it: in Persian art, an angelic appearance is an invitation to look closer, not the end of the interpretation.

Image credit: Muzaffar ‘Ali (attributed), “The Angel Surush Rescues Khusrau Parviz from a Cul-de-sac,” folio from the Shahnameh of Shah Tahmasp, made in Tabriz, Iran, ca. 1530–35. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Arthur A. Houghton Jr., 1970 (1970.301.73). Public domain under The Met’s Open Access policy.

Sources

Retour au blog