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The Synthesis of European and Mughal Art October 13, 2000 please click on the Fig. number to go to the illustration, and click on the
The European engravings brought to India in the sixteenth century by the Jesuits to help communicate Christian doctrines to the Mughals are well documented.1 Prints of non-religious subjects and topographical materials, which need not have necessarily found their way into Mughal possession by way of the Jesuit missionaries is a subject that has been dealt with to a far lesser extent. Individual travelers and merchants took engravings of classical nudes and mythical subjects to the East; this would explain the presence in Mughal albums of prints of nude, mythological and classical subjects, and motifs from maps in background landscapes.2 What has also been neglected is a study of how the Mughal artists synthesized aspects
of these prints and maps to create a new painting style.
Perhaps the best example of the synthesis of Mughal and European art in
any one manuscript may be seen in an illustrated Khamsa,
or collection of epic poems by the Persian poet
The purpose of this article is to examine the adoption of the European techniques of sfumato, modeling and stereoscopic perspective in the Khamsa illustrations and then to trace the European sources for the motifs of some the key miniatures. In this regard, it is necessary also to look at the use of motifs taken from European maps for Mughal background landscapes, which is a subject that has not been dealt with in Mughal art history. This article also demonstrates that the use of these European elements in the Khamsa was not the sign of a passive acceptance of ‘superior’ painting techniques but a creative and meaningful response by the Mughal artists in the form of articulating their own ideas. Indeed, to use the language of modern technology, the Khamsa is a fine example of the Mughal artists’ ingenuity in “uploading” these foreign elements into their own aesthetic and semantic structures.
We begin with subject of artistic techniques. “Sfumato” may be defined as the deliberate blurring of a line or contour to make an object seem to disappear in the distance, or to add a soft-focus effect to a face or body in the foreground. In the Khamsa, this technique is used in conjunction with another technique, that of painting distant landscape in pale blue in order to create the appearance of distance through gradual shifts of colour from dark to pale tones towards the horizon. Such a technique has its origins in European book illustration, as a folio depicting the Martyrdom of St. Sebastian (Fig. 1) clearly shows.4 This is by Simon Bening from a book of hours painted around 1520-30 in Bruges. It is unlikely that an original page from a treasured Book of Hours found its way to Mughal India, as these folios were avidly collected by the rich and powerful in Europe. However, there were single folios in wide circulation, which were meant as samples for potential buyers. In the Khamsa, several pictures feature the same technique used for the background scenes. One of the best examples is in the background of a picture of Mary the Copt, the legendary founder of alchemy (Fig. 2).5 Here, behind a distant city, hills and mountains have been painted with faint blue tones to add an idyllic atmosphere to the scene. Such deliberate blurring of forms is also uncharacteristic of the sharper linearity of forms and the use of flat, gold leaf backgrounds in Persian and earlier Mughal art.
Many of the engravings found in Mughal possession excel in the technique of modeling
- using light and dark tones to depict the direction of light in order to
conjure up the illusion of three dimensions. This is seen best in the modeling of cloth.
European engravings provided clear models of the principle of
establishing the direction of light. In
an engraving of a man and a woman by Jacob Golzius, which was undoubtedly in
Mughal possession, as it was eventually to be copied by a Mughal painter in the
Gulshan Album, almost all the surface of this print is a spectacle of the
engraver’s skill in rendering the play of light on the folds of silk garments
and curtains (Fig. 3). Although there are several examples of Mughal artists
rendering the light and shade of folds of cloth in the Khamsa
manuscript, the most impressive study appears in The
other major European technique utilized by the Mughal artists was the depiction
of perspective. One of the most
remarkable illustrations in the Khamsa
is The King is Carried Away by a Giant Bird - The Story of the Princess
of the Black Pavilion, f.195a (Fig. 5).
It is rich in incidental detail and rural vignettes on a minute scale.
Most of all, however, this miniature is an opportunity to show off the
new technique of perspective, not to mention a new aerial viewpoint. The
The King of Black Carried Away by a Giant Bird - The Story of the Princess of the Black Pavilion is a complex exercise in rendering of the illusion of distance: there are no fewer than seven receding planes and several rustic vignettes. This miniaturisation accentuates the feeling of distance and dizzying height. There is also a play on contrasts of scale: the tiny figure in the talons of the monstrous bird and the diminution of objects in the distance. The use of this form of stereoscopic perspective is a decisive break with the earlier techniques of Persian painting where figures near the horizon differ little in size from those in the foreground and where objects appear stacked, one upon another. This miniature is remarkable not only for demonstrating the Mughal adoption and mastery of techniques of European art but it also shows the Mughal artists adapting aspects of European maps and paintings as subordinate aspects of an overall composition and to support their visual storytelling techniques.
The
image of the figure in the claws of a giant bird may have a precedent in
European cabinet or panel painting, which preserved the style of earlier
Northern European painting. An example of this is
The Fall of Icarus (Staedtel, Frankfurt-am-Main, no.1689), by
the Antwerp painter, Tobias Verhaecht (1561-1631).6 When considering the
landscape and main subject together, the colouring and composition of this
painting compare favourably to the Khamsa
illustration, which also synthesizes landscape elements and deep perspective.
Also comparable are prints and paintings of the story of Ganymede, seized by
Jupiter in the form of a great eagle.7 At least in these works, it is a bird carrying off a figure rather than a
man with wings. In a charming reversal, the Europeans were influenced
by Indian imagery in a print by Stradanus (Jan van der Straet, 1523-1605) of Magellan's
Discovery of the Straits, which features a large bird, this time carrying an
elephant in its talons across the sky. The
image first appears as a description of the Garuda
in the Mahabharata (I, 1353) and
In
Arabic literature, the great bird appears in the Arabian
Nights as a rescuer of the stranded travelling merchant in one of the tales;
in Other
symbolic associations available to the Mughals may be found in some verses from
the Mantiq al-Tayr, where c
The
Many European maps and topographical views of the sixteenth century may be seen as the sources for figural elements and views of ships and distant cities on hills found in the Khamsa pages, these connexions have so far remained unknown. Whether these were brought to India by merchants or by the Jesuits is not known but the Jesuits had certainly brought over maps to their other missions in Japan. One Japanese copy of a map for a screen is from the Civitates Orbis Terrarum published in Antwerp in 1572 and 1581.11 One of the most significant gifts to Akbar from the first Jesuit mission was an atlas of the world.12 The Jesuit father Monserrate reports that on one occasion, while the Jesuits were before Akbar, the emperor called for an atlas and asked where Portugal was in relation to his own kingdom.13 In the Khamsa, motifs from maps may be seen in the form of the figure playing bagpipes accompanied by a greyhound dog in The King of Black Carried Away by a Giant Bird - The Story of the Princess of the Black Pavilion described above (see detail Fig. 6). There is a strikingly similar figure found in a map of 1584, printed by Gottfried von Kempen in an edition of Ptolemy's Geographiae Libri Octo (Fig. 7).14
Scenes
of boats and figures pulling in nets from the sea are found in the Civitates
Orbis Terrarum (Fig. 8),
mentioned above,15
in the Urbium praecipuarum mundi theatrum
quintam (Fig. 9) and in Abraham
Ortelius’s atlas, the Theatrum Orbis
Terrarum (Antwerp, 1570). These are scenes that may be found also in so many
Mughal miniatures of the late sixteenth century and in the
Khamsa’s
Other
pictures reinforce the view that the Mughals used European illustrations and
maps as a source of imagery for their book illustrations. A Flemish seascape may be identified in the background to the
illustration of
Another
aspect indebted to European prints in the Khamsa
is that of a bridge over a river with tiny figures walking over it. This may be seen in the background of
European
imagery was also used in the Khamsa
for the picture of The Disputing
Physicians (or Philosophers) folio 23b (Fig.
14). The picture features a
series of wall paintings in the background; one rectangular panel with another
beneath it is situated in an architectural niche with curtains at the centre.
To the left is an arch under which is painted a scene with a background
of its own, as if to appear as a window view on to a landscape.
In the spandrel of the arch is an angel, painted to appear as a relief.
These features in the composition can be compared to a
sixteenth-century European print of the Visitation
from the Evangelicae Historiae Imagines
(c. 1571, Fig. 15).20
This has the same organization of space: an arch to the left in where there is a
subsidiary scene, the Birth of St. John
the Baptist, and a central panel (the Journey
to Nazareth), in front of which
the main 'real' scene takes place, the Visitation.
The
central panel in the background of folio 23b may be identified as St.
Luke and the Angel or a St. Matthew
and the Angel. It is clear that
the wall painting is based on a version of a very similar scene by The scene depicted on the left of the Disputing Physicians features several bathers in a tub. The picture is obviously European in origin, as nudity in Islamic art is extremely rare.26 The panel to the left appears as a real opening onto a background landscape under a painted arch. It presents itself as problematic: either this is an obvious illusion, or the nude scene is taking place in the same room as the encounter between the disputing physicians.
In contemporary Europe, nude scenes such as Diana and Actaeon,27 or David Surprising Bathsheba28 were becoming popular in paintings and prints. Susannah and the Elders,29 a biblical story, which contains a bathing scene, was frequently represented in the form of prints and tapestries in the sixteenth century.30 But in these images, the elders are always shown fully clothed.31 The scene in the Khamsa appears not to be based on a bible story, or on Ovid, but is in fact, related to an entirely different pictorial tradition. The image is copied from a print from a fifteenth-century genre depicting women's bathhouses, common in the Northern Renaissance (Figs. 16).The central motif that runs through several of these prints is a tub with scantily clad or nude bathers in it (Fig. 16).32
By the sixteenth century, the tradition of representing bath-houses was carried on by Dürer in such drawings as Im Turspalt ein Voyeur,33 which was copied later in that century by Hans Springinklee. H. S. Beham also executed several prints of women bathing in tubs (Fig. 17)34 comparable to the scene in the Khamsa. The reason for including the bathtub scene in this picture was perhaps to cast an aspersion on the consistent nudity found in European art, in contradiction to the rather more sacred imagery found in the painting next to it. Although
the painting illustrates
Many of the debates that took place between Akbar’s Islamic theologians and the Jesuits are recorded in Father Monserrate’s Commentary and tell of the theological debates about the Trinity, the Immaculate conception and the Art of the Covenant, for example. 37 Thus,
The Disputing Physicians may be seen to have a dual nature: it illustrates a
legendary story and a real life event, so that each appears to reflect the
other. The painting illustrates the episode in the text and is this is the outer
meaning of the painting (known as the It is also possible to see the picture of a painting within a painting in the Disputing Physicians as a representation of one of the physician’s visionary experiences (revealed by the curtain being drawn to one side), hence the physician swooning to the right. St. Luke (or St. Matthew) has a vision of the angel in the European painting on the wall, which in turn is portrayed as the vision of one of the physicians. In parallel with a common compositional scheme in Counter-Reformation Europe, the Disputing Physicians is a Mughal example of an artistic device that consists of the representation of a visionary experience, by placing the visionary in the lower part of the picture with the vision in the upper part.40 Finally in the verse in the Khamsa text dealing directly with this picture we read:
Seen as an illustration of this verse, the European images, which may also represent Christianity, or the vision of the disputing physician, are the “mirage” referred to in the text. The Disputing Physicians turns the tables on European art using it as part of a complex allegory of the Mughals’ own making. With the kind of synthesis of European and Mughal Indian painting seen in the Khamsa’s
Disputing Physicians; [1] The first wave of European prints dating from the 1540s must have arrived with Francis Xavier who was sent to India in 1542, or subsequently with fifty of his Jesuit brothers who joined him in Goa after 1555. Some of these mid-sixteenth century prints were probably acquired by the Mughal embassy to Goa in 1575. The second wave, dating from the latter part of the century must have arrived at the Mughal court with the three Jesuit missions, the first in 1580, the second in 1591, and the third in 1595. The literature dealing with this subject is quite extensive. For a good number of reproductions, and groundbreaking attributions see R. Ettinghausen, ‘New Pictorial Evidence of Catholic Missionary Activity: Mughal India (Early XVIII Century) Perennitas, Münster, 1963, pp. 385-96 and M.C. Beach, ‘The Gulshan Album and its European Sources’, Bulletin Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, #332, 1965, Vol. LXIII, pp. 63-89 and also by the same author, ‘An Early European Source in Mughal Painting’ Oriental Art 22, no. 2 (1976), pp. 180-188; The Grand Mogul: Imperial Painting in India, 1600-1660 (Williamstown Mass., 1978); The Imperial Image, Paintings for the Mughal Court (Washington DC, 1981). Percy Brown’s Indian Painting Under the Mughals (Oxford, 1924) and E. D. Maclaglan’s The Jesuits and the Great Mughal (London, 1932) although old still have useful passages on European and Mughal art, as does P. du Jarric’s Akbar and the Jesuits Tr., C. H. Payne (London, 1926), J.F. Butler’s Christian Art in India (Madras, 1986) and A. K. Das’s, Mughal Painting During Jahangir’s Time (Calcutta, 1978). More up-to-date are E. Koch’s brilliant essays and studies: ‘The Influence of the Jesuit Missions on Symbolic Representation of the Mughal Emperors’ in The Akbar Mission and Miscellaneous Studies, ed. C. W. Troll, Islam in India: Studies and Commentaries, 1, New Delhi, 1982, pp. 14-29 and ‘Jahangir and the Angels: Recently Discovered Wall Paintings Under European Influence in the Fort of Lahore’ in India and the West: Proceedings of a Seminar Dedicated to the Memory of Hermann Goetz, ed., J. Deppert, New Delhi, 1983, pp. 173-95. Also worth consulting J. M. Rogers, Islamic Art and Design 1500-1700 (London, 1983) and Mughal Miniatures (London, 1993); A. Okada, Imperial Mughal Painters, Indian Miniatures from the 16th and 17th Centuries tr. D. Dusinberre (New York, 1992); M. Brand and G. D. Lowry, Akbar's India: Art From the Mughal City of Victory (New York 1985) and D. Jones, ed., A Mirror of Princes, The Mughals and the Medici (Bombay, 1987). The subject was researched by E. Devapriam, The Influence of Western Art on Mughal Painting (unpublished doctoral thesis, Case Western Reserve University, 1972). [Back to text] [2] Prints may have arrived at the Mughal court independently of the Jesuits, as they were not the only carriers of printed material to the East. In 1596, at Nova Zembla, between the Barents and Kara seas, a Dutch vessel ran aground on its way to the East via the Northern Passage. The ship was probably not the first or last merchant ship to carry prints as merchandise for oriental markets. For examples of what were found, see J. Braat, J. P. Filedt Kok, J. H. Hofenk de Graaf, and P. Poldervaart, 'Restauratie Conservatie en Onderzoek van de op Nova Zembla gevonden zestiendeeuwse prenten', Bulletin Rijksmuseum, vol. 28, 1980, pp. 43-79. [Back to text] [3] See F. Martin, The Miniature Paintings
and Painters of Persia, India
and Turkey, from the 8th to the 18th Century (London, 1912); G. Warner,
Descriptive Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts in the Library of C.W. Dyson Perrins, DCL,
FSA, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1920); P. Brown,
Indian Paintings Under the Mughals, A.
D. 1550 to AD 1750 (Oxford,
1924); S. C. Welch, 'The Emperor Akbar's Khamsa
of [4] Art at Auction, The Year at Sotheby’s 1983-84 (London, 1984), p. 156. [Back to text] [5] See Brend, 1995, fig. 38. [Back to text] [6] See J. M. Rogers, Islamic Art and Design 1500-1700 (London, 1983) [Back to text] [7] For several images comparable to that in the Khamsa, see G. Kempler, Ganymed, Studien zur Typologie, Ikonografie und Ikonologie (Würzerg, 1980). [Back to text] [8] See R. Wittkower, 'Miraculous Birds', Journal
of the Warburg Institute, vol. I, no. 3, pp. 255-257, and for a reproduction of the Stradanus print.
The same motif but in the guise of a Persian or Chinoiserie [9] E. Binney 3rd., Indian Miniature Painting From the Collection of Edward Binney 3rd (Portland, 1973), p. 50. [Back to text] [10] J.C. Burgel, The Feather of [11] McCall, ‘Early Jesuit Art in the Far East ’, Artibus Asiae, 1947, vol. X/3, p. 223. [Back to text] [12] Hoyland and Banerjee, op. cit., p. 28. J. S. Hoyland and S. N. Bannerjee, Trs., The Commentary of Father Monserrate, S. J. (Madras, 1922). [Back to text] [13] Ibid ., p. 126. [Back to text] [14] Robert Messina, Biblioteca Geografica (Rieti, 1991), p. 107. [Back to text] [15] Ibid., 269. [Back to text] [16] In the background of [17] Munich Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, MS. lat.23638, fol. 3v. Publ. W. S. Gibson, Bruegel, (London, 1977), fig. 103. [Back to text] [18] Publ. R. Messina, op.cit., (Rieti, 1991), p.108. [Back to text] [19] Gibson, 1997, fig. 46, p. 78. [Back to text] [20] By Hieronymus Wierix in M. Mauquoy-Hendrickx, Les Estampes de Wierix Conservees au Cabinets des Estampes de la Bibliothèque Royale Albert Ier, vol. I (Bruxelles, no date), vol. III, no. 1992, pl. 307. [Back to text] [21] P. Pal, ed., Master Artists of the Mughal Court (Marg, Bombay, 1991)., fig. 10. [Back to text] [22] Published in M. C. Beach, Mughal and Rajput Painting (Cambridge, 1992)., fig. 36. [Back to text] [23] F. de Nave and D. Imhof, Christoffel Plantijn en de Iberische Wereld (Antwerp, 1992), cat. 10. [Back to text] [24] The only comparable material in Mughal art is a picture of the Virgin Mary and an angel holding up to her an open book, see S. N. Gupta, Catalogue of Paintings in the Central Museum, Lahore (Lahore, 1922), pl. VI. [Back to text] [25] Mauquoy-Hendrickx, op. cit., Vol. III, no. 2231, pl. 397. [Back to text] [26] There appears to be only one other related scene in Mughal art, in a loose leaf at the Victoria and Albert Museum (D399-1885) where, in the background, two nude children play over a barrel. [Back to text] [27] Cf.an engraving by Georg Pencz in D. Landau, Engl. Tr. A. Paul, Georg Pencz (Milan, 1978), pl. B. 79b. [Back to text] [28] Ibid., pl. B. 21. [Back to text] [29] Ibid., 28B and a print by J. Brae the Younger in Max Geisberg and W. L. Strauss ed., The German Single Leaf Woodcut 1500-1550 (New York, 1978), pl. G. 396. [Back to text] [30] See prints by Anton Wierix in Mauquoy-Hendrickx, op. cit., vol. I, pls. 70-71, and mention of tapestries featuring the same subject in W. S. Thomson, The History of Tapestry (London, 1973), p. 254 and 380. [Back to text] [31] See an art historical treatment of the topos by H. Rosenhagen, Susanna im Bade (Dresden, 1925). [Back to text] [32] See H. P. Duerr, Nachtheit und Scham, Der Mythos vom Zivilisationsprozess (Frankfurt am Main, 1988), particularly figure 25, a scene of a Burgundian bath-house with two nudes who very much resemble those in the Khamsa, f. 23b, and fig. 40, Jungbrunnen. Figs 26, 31, and 43 are also comparable. [Back to text] [33] Ibid., pl. 19. [Back to text] [34] See G. Pauli, Hans Sebald Beham, Ein Kritisches Verzeichniss (Strasbourg, 1901), 216, ii and 210, ii, the latter print displays a woman's anatomy as frankly as the representation in the Khamsa. [Back to text] [35] The Jesuits were actually painted into a story of a now dispersed
[36] H. Beveridge, Tr., Akbar-name. 2 vols. (Calcutta, 1907, 1910 and 1912), 1948, p. 365. [Back to text] [37] J. S. Hoyland and S. N. Bannerjee, Trs., The Commentary of Father Monserrate, S. J.(Madras, 1922). [Back to text] [38] P. Du Jarric, Akbar and the Jesuits, Tr., C. H. Payne (London, 1926), p. 168. [Back to text] [39] Seen
as a hierarchy, the divine faculty moves the intellect, whose subordinate is
the imagination, below this is sense perception and then material objects.
This is similar to Plato's line divided in the Republic
between ideas, mathematical concepts, objects and shadows.
Such schemata, synthesized with the hierarchical scheme inherited
from Plotinus are seen in various Islamic philosophers’ works from the [40] See V. Stoichita, Visionary Experience in the Golden Age of Spanish Art (London, 1995), p. 27. [Back to text] |
,
now in the British Library, dating between 1593-1595.
While some scholars of Indian and Islamic art have 
Brings Khusrau News of 
52a (
is
here shown soaring above the earth, over farms, towns and figures absorbed in
the minutiae of everyday
(III, 39) and in Europe from Marco Polo's description of Madagascar.
, it appears as a protector and substitute parent of
but also, as an evil bird to be conquered by Iskandar.The
's
Mantiq al-Tayr.
Any of these sentiments may have attached to the image of the 
Mourning the Death of His Father in particular (detail 
and the
Gazelle, f.19a (
, who painted
The Disputing Physicians, 
c.1590.
, dated 1587-8, now at
the Bodleian Library. This is of
St. Matthew writing in a book held by an angel. The original European engraving of
c.
, the
chronicle of the Emperor’s reign, describes an invitation to scholars and
theologians of all religions, heralded by the foundation of the 
(or debating chamber), opened at 
by the Mughals) but also, its inner meaning (
)
refers
to the Mughal and Jesuits' theological debates and
the 
,
Journal of the Walters Art Gallery,
XXIII, 1960, pp. 87-96; T.J. Brown, ' Manuscripts
From the Dyson Perrins Collection', The
British Museum Quarterly, XXIII/2, 1961, pp. 28-30; G.M. Meredith-Owens,
Handlist of Persian Manuscripts 1895-1966 (London, 1968); N. Titley,
Miniatures from Persian Manuscripts in
the British Library and the British Museum (London, 1977); J.P. Losty, The
Art of the Book in India (London, 1982);
H. Marshall, ‘An Analysis of Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Mughal
Painting: With Reference to Persian Cultural and Political Influences’
(Unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 1981); J. M. Rogers, Islamic Art and
Design 1500-1700 (London, 1983); M.C. Beach, Early Mughal
Painting (Harvard, 1987); A. Okada, Imperial Mughal
Painters, Indian Miniatures from the 16th and 17th Centuries (Paris,
1992); J.M. Rogers, Mughal
Miniatures (London, 1993); S. P. Verma, Mughal
Painters and their Work: A Bibliographical Survey and Comprehensive
Catalogue (Delhi, 1994) and B. Brend, The Emperor Akbar’s
Khamsa of 
with an elephant in its beak, or talons, may be seen in BL Add. 18803, f.
15, and in a Jain cosmological design and as a design on a Mughal carpet
both at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, reproduced in Coomaraswamy,
Catalogue of Indian Collections at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston,
1930), vol. II, pls. LXXIII, LXII and CCXCVIII. [
Presented With a Fish in the Keir Collection, three men pull in a boat, a detail which also
appears in the Khamsa of 
1592-94, now in the Freer Gallery of
Art, Washington. Jesuits also
appear in an illustration by 
c. 1605, now in the Chester
Beatty Library, Dublin. [
al-Safa, 
, Ibn Sina,
(whose
work was illustrated by Akbar's artists) to Ibn Rushd and Ibn al-
.
[