The Connection between Text and Image from Roland Barthes’s Point of View in Illustrated Pages of the Miscellany of Iskandar Sultan, Baysonghori Shahnameh and Muhammad Jouki’s Shahnameh

Page layout in Iran has a long and old history. Manuscripts with different scientific and fictional, historical and religious themes were always considered and created in collaboration with calligraphers and painters and presented in a collection. This collection includes different elements such as cover, inflection, header, pagination, header, title, grid, frame, text and image, and the elements of text and image and their relationship with the page space are very important. Two languages ​​have always been used in page layout: written language and visual language. Together, these two elements narrate the story of a book, painting is formed in connection with literature, and the image is used to describe the subject and the writing of the books. The image did not exist without text and existed from the heart of the text and had no independent identity. It is important to pay attention to the textual element and the visual element and the connection that is formed between the two, that forms the main issue of this research. The adornment of manuscripts created a close interaction between art and literature in Iran, which led to commonalities between the two visual elements. The image created by the artist always appears next to literary texts. The arrangement of manuscripts with images created a platform for collaboration between the calligrapher and the painter so that the image would appear along with the text, sometimes with one of the two more inducing powers. The image is used both for the beauty of the page and to attract the audience, and for describing the subject and the narration, in order to convey the meaning of the text to the audience more easily. The text element and the image element are intertwined in a two-way interaction, together creating a single whole that advances the story. The position of the text and the position of the image on a page of the illustrated manuscript are of particular importance. The location of the text and its fit with the image, law and various patterns in the illustrated manuscripts create different historical periods in Iran. Examining the position of text and image and the relationship between these two visual elements on the page forms the basis of this research. In this research, the intention is to investigate the relationship between the text element and the image element in the illustrated manuscripts of Golchin Eskandar Sultan, Shahnameh of Baysonghori and Muhammad Jouki’s Shahnameh from the Timurid period based on Roland Barthes' theory. The relationship between the two elements of text and image in page layout is very important. Just as the language of the text plays a key role in conveying the concept to the audience, the image also has the same burden of conveying  the concepts as the language used to convey the concept, and the visual language is of particular importance in the art of book-making. Iranian literature and arts are interconnected in the process of using archetypes. Poets and painters use the same language to describe the world they inherited in general from their ancestors. Roland Barthes explores this connection in his book, an Introduction to the Structure of Narratives. This book is in fact a collection of Barthes articles on narratology and explains the most important uses of linguistic methods in literary and artistic analysis. The field, in which Roland Barthes enters, discusses the structural analysis of narrative in an academic way. In this book, he defines three types of relationships between text language and image language: 1. Descriptive, when the image supports the text and the text plays a major role in the page and the image supports the text. 2. Similar, when the text and the image support each other equally and both are equally important on the page and together they convey the meaning of the narrative to the audience. 3. Reference, when the text supports the image and the image plays a major role on the page, the image is focused and dominant on the page and acts as a reference. Barthes claims that these three patterns apply to all existing books and manuscripts, and that the connection between text and image is not beyond these three states. This research is examined based on these three theories. The three theories mentioned in the illustrated manuscripts of Golchin Eskandar Sultan, Shahnameh of Baysonghori and Muhammad Jouki’s Shahnameh from the Timurid period are studied. The purpose of this study, in addition to explaining and discovering the page layout pattern of the three illustrated manuscripts, is to identify the relationship between text and image based on Roland Barthes theory, to answer the question of how the relationship between text and image with reference to theory Roland Barthes is defined in three illustrated manuscripts of Golchin Eskandar Sultan, Shahnameh of Baysonghori and Muhammad Jouki’s Shahnameh from the Timurid period. First, the position of the text and the image are measured together on the page, and the overall structure of the page is examined based on the relationship between text and image in Roland Barthes's theories, then, the relationship between text and image based on structuralism. The research methods and their communication pattern are compared with each other to obtain the dominant communication pattern in these illustrated pages. This research has been done by descriptive-analytical method and structural method. The method of data analysis is qualitative, which is analyzed according to Roland Barthes' theories. First, the elements of a page are visually analyzed from illustrated versions, then the content of the elements of the pages, including the position of the text and the image, is analyzed, and the relationship between the two elements of text and image is examined based on Barthes's three communication theories.  The process of analyzing data from part to whole is inductive. First, the components within the page, which are the visual elements, are examined, then the composition and relationship of these elements with each other are examined in the general space of the page, and it is defined according to Barthes's three theories. The method of data collection is in the form of a library, which is collected from available written documents and images of the studied versions, from valid online databases. The statistical population of this research is illustrated manuscripts selected from the Timurid period. Since this is a qualitative research, the selection of samples is based on qualitative characteristics. The selection of research items was based on the fact that the text element and the image element exist on one page side by side, and also a full page of illustrated copies is available in Internet sources. At the end, three illustrated manuscripts were selected, Golchin Eskandar Sultan, Shahnameh of Baysonghori and Muhammad Jouki’s Shahnameh, which are selected from each of them, two illustrated pages according to their comprehensiveness in terms of text and image on one page, and then according to the structural analysis of images, the position of text and image on the page is analyzed and examined based on Barthes's theory. In this research, it is assumed that a suitable pattern is created by using the box, title and composition of elements in a picture page, to better induce the concept of book narration to the audience. Also, in the layout of three illustrated manuscripts of Golchin Eskandar Sultan, Shahnameh of Baysonghori and Muhammad Jouki’s Shahnameh from the Timurid period, the image always dominates the text. According to Roland Barthes's theory, reference communication is established in all illustrated pages and there are no two descriptive and identical connections in these illustrated pages. Finally, based on the analysis performed, it is inferred that in all cases of research, the text box and the image box are present and the failure in the box is clearly visible in half of the cases. The title exists in half of the research cases and is included in the text, which is closely related to the text. The dominant element on the page is the "image", and in most cases of research, the title is inside the text box and in half of the cases of research, failure is seen in the box. Although in all cases, the image is centered on the page, in half of the cases a "reference" relationship is established according to Barthes's theory, but in the other half of the case, a "matched" relationship is observed. Achievements from the study of illustrated manuscripts of Golchin Eskandar Sultan, Shahnameh of Baysonghori and Muhammad Jouki’s Shahnameh from the Timurid period, based on Roland Barthes' theory, can bring forward creative ideas and new innovations remained to be surveyed for contemporary artists.