Mughal art

Since the culture of the Mughals was intimately connected to the indigenous Hindu traditions of the Indian subcontinent, their art will be treated only synoptically in this article. (For a more detailed account, the reader should see the sections on Mughal art in the visual arts of the Indian subcontinent portion of the article South Asian arts, notably Islamic architecture in India: Mughal style and Painting).

The art of the Mughals was similar to that of the Ottomans in that it was a late imperial art of Muslim princes. Both styles were rooted in several centuries (at least from the 13th century onward) of adaptation of Islamic functions to indigenous forms. It was in the 14th-century architecture of South Asian sites such as Tughluqabad, Gaur, and Ahmadabad that a uniquely Indian type of Islamic hypostyle mosque was created, with a triple axial nave, corner towers, axial minarets, and cupolas. It was also during these centuries that the first mausoleums set in scenically spectacular locations were built. By then the conquering Muslims had fully learned how to utilize local methods of construction, and they adapted South Asian decorative techniques and motifs.

Mughal art was in continuous contact with Iran or, rather, with the Timurid world of the second half of the 15th century. The models and the memories were in Herat or Samarkand, but the artists were raided from Safavid Iran, and the continuous flow of painters from Iran to the Mughal empire is a key factor in understanding Mughal painting.

The mausoleum of Humayun in Delhi (1565-69), the city of Fatehpur Sikri (from 1569 onward), and the Taj Mahal at Agra (1631-53) summarize the development of Mughal architecture. In all three examples it can be seen that what Mughal architecture brought to the Islamic tradition (other than traditional Indian themes, especially in decoration) was technical perfection in the use of red sandstone or marble as building and decorative materials.

In Mughal painting the kind of subject that tended to be illustrated was remarkably close to those used in Safavid history books--legendary stories, local events, portraits, genre scenes. What evolved quickly was a new manner of execution, and this style can be seen as early as about 1567, when the celebrated manuscript Dastan-e Amir Hamzeh ("Stories of Amir Hamzeh") was painted (some 200 miniatures remain and are found in most major collections of Indian miniatures, especially at the Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). Traditional Iranian themes--battles, receptions, feasts--acquired monumentality, not only because of the inordinate size of the images but also because almost all of the objects and figures depicted were seen in terms of mass rather than line. Something of the colourfulness of Iranian painting was lost, but instead images acquired a greater expressive power. Mughal portraiture gave more of a sense of the individual than did the portraits of the Safavids. As in a celebrated representation of a dying courtier in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Mughal drawings could be poignantly naturalistic. Mood was important to the Mughal artist--in many paintings of animals there is a playful mood; a sensuous mood is evident in the first Muslim images to glorify the female body and the erotic.

In summary it can be said that the Mughals produced an art of extraordinary stylistic contrasts that reflected the complexities of its origins and of its aristocratic patronage.