Seeking God in Beardless Beloveds: Obscenity and the Sacred in Persianate Painting and Court Book Culture of the 17th Century

Gilad’s dissertation, Seeking God in Beardless Beloveds: Obscenity and the Sacred in Persianate Painting and Court Book Culture of the 17th Century examines how divine presence and ethical transgression intersect in early modern Persianate representations of beardless boy beloveds. Challenging the prevailing view that sacredness and obscenity exist in binary opposition, the project argues that these domains were co-dependent in the visual culture of the Safavid and Mughal courts. Rather than serving as mere metaphors for divine beauty, erotic images of prepubescent boys—depicting homoerotic intimacy, spiritual rapture, and divine allegory—actively shaped conceptions of mysticism, ethical conduct, and courtly pleasure.

Focusing on illustrated manuscripts and albums, the dissertation explores how visual ambiguity allowed Persianate painting to simultaneously affirm and destabilize ethical norms. Erotic and sacred registers are shown not as oppositional but as mutually constitutive, working together to articulate a sophisticated language of moral complexity. Through case studies of widely circulated works, the dissertation traces how motifs such as the beautiful boy as divine proxy, the monarch as desiring subject, and the European youth as displaced object of longing, offered a visual theology in which spiritual ideals were forged through tension with the forbidden. In doing so, it rethinks the relationship between desire and piety in early modern Persianate art and calls for a new understanding of the sacred image—one in which ethical meaning emerges not despite, but through, obscenity.