I spent a wet January morning in the archive rooms above the museum, studying reproductions of Fath-Ali Shah as if they were court decrees. The surprise was not the gold, which I expected, but the discipline of the red ground: it behaves like a stage curtain, a carpet, and a wall all at once.
Ornament is not decoration here. It is jurisdiction.
The portrait does not describe the ruler; it arranges the room around him until the room agrees.