An Intertextual Study of Nizami’s Poetry and Behzad’s Painting in “Chinese and Roman Painters’ Debate” Tale

One of the brightest schools of painting was Herat School from whose greatest artist, Behzad, beautiful paintings have remained. Some of these paintings are associated with poetry and literature and reflect verbal narratives. Using Gérard Genette intertextuality approach, the present study investigates one of the paintings which exists in both verbal and pictorial forms: the verbal form is derived from Nizami’s Sharaf-nama which was painted by Behzad. The purpose was to investigate the meaning of a text in its connection with other texts; in other words, this study tried to find the relationship between words and image, and uncover the underlying theme that ties them together.