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Mughal and Deccani Paintings
Accompanying an exhibition at the Museum Rietberg, this catalogue of 60 works drawn from one of the most important private collections in Europe provides an excellent survey of Indian painting from 1575-1850 from two of the most important sources: the court of the north Indian Mughal rulers and the ateliers in the Deccan farther south. The works present a wide variety of styles and themes and invite close examination. Mughal culture was one of the richest the world has ever seen. The magnificence of the Mughal palaces and tombs, the pomp of the court, the lavish ceremonies and feasts, the fame of the court poets, intellectuals, painters and musicians, the sumptuousness of the courtiers' atti...
Muqarnas, Volume 25
Muqarnas is sponsored by The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. In Muqarnas articles are being published on all aspects of Islamic visual culture, historical and contemporary, as well as articles dealing with unpublished textual primary sources.
A Secret Garden
Danielle Porret’s passion for Asian art and for Indian painting in particular was inflamed when she attended classes on Asian mythology during her studies at Geneva University. It intensified further when in 1966 she visited an exhibition in London of Indian paintings collected by Mildred and William Archer, curators of Indian art at the British India office and the Victoria & Albert Museum respectively. A conference interpreter by profession, Porret began to study the collections of Asian art at London’s great museums and the technique of paper restoration. And she started to buy Indian paintings herself. Danielle Porret’s collection comprises outstanding works spanning seven centurie...
Pearls of the Parrot of India
Amir Khusraw Dihlawi (1253-1325) was one of the most famous Mughal poets of the Indian subcontinent and the self-styled Parrot of India. His Pearls of poetry are seen here in his Khamsa, one of the most admired texts in the Islamic world. This copy marks the culmination of the development of the deluxe Mughal manuscript in the 1590s. The writing of the Walters Khamsa fell to the most highly esteemed calligrapher of the day, Muhammad Jusayn al-Kashmiri, then at the zenith of his career. The Khamsa must have been understood at several different levels at the Mughal court. For some, it was a stellar work of literature. Others undoubtedly saw the manuscript as a repository of visual art, captivated by the sophistication of the calligraphy and the brilliance of the paintings. Still others found this book a bibliographic gem, a precious object to hold and behold.
Sultans of the South
Between the 14th and the 17th century, the Deccan plateau of south-central India was home to a series of important and highly cultured Muslim courts. Subtly blending elements from Iran, West Asia, southern India, and northern India, the arts produced under these sultanates are markedly different from those of the rest of India and especially from those produced under Mughal patronage. This publication, a result of a 2008 symposium held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, investigates the arts of Deccan and the unique output in the fields of painting, literature, architecture, arms, textiles, and carpet.
Libraries in the Manuscript Age
The case studies presented in this volume help illuminate the rationale for the founding of libraries in an age when books were handwritten, thus contributing to the comparative history of libraries. They focus on examples ranging from the seventh to the seventeenth century emanating from the Muslim World, East Asia, Byzantium and Western Europe. Accumulation and preservation are the key motivations for the development of libraries. Rulers, scholars and men of religion were clearly dedicated to collecting books and sought to protect these fragile objects against the various hazards that threatened their survival. Many of these treasured books are long gone, but there remain hosts of evidence enabling one to reconstruct the collections to which they belonged, found in ancient buildings, literary accounts, archival documentation and, most crucially, catalogues. With such material at hand or, in some cases, the manuscripts of a certain library which have come down to us, it is possible to reflect on the nature of these libraries of the past, the interests of their owners, and their role in the intellectual history of the manuscript age.
Real Birds in Imagined Gardens
Accounts of paintings produced during the Mughal dynasty (1526–1857) tend to trace a linear, “evolutionary” path and assert that, as European Renaissance prints reached and influenced Mughal artists, these artists abandoned a Persianate style in favor of a European one. Kavita Singh counters these accounts by demonstrating that Mughal painting did not follow a single arc of stylistic evolution. Instead, during the reigns of the emperors Akbar and Jahangir, Mughal painting underwent repeated cycles of adoption, rejection, and revival of both Persian and European styles. Singh’s subtle and original analysis suggests that the adoption and rejection of these styles was motivated as much ...
Can Art History be Made Global?
The book responds to the challenge of the global turn in the humanities from the perspective of art history. A global art history, it argues, need not follow the logic of economic globalization nor seek to bring the entire world into its fold. Instead, it draws on a theory of transculturation to explore key moments of an art history that can no longer be approached through a facile globalism. How can art historical analysis theorize relationships of connectivity that have characterized cultures and regions across distances? How can it meaningfully handle issues of commensurability or its absence among cultures? By shifting the focus of enquiry to South Asia, the five meditations that make up this book seek to translate intellectual insights of experiences beyond Euro–America into globally intelligible analyses.
Images of Thought
With many illustrations and diagrams, Images of Thought provides easy to follow ways in which to read Indian, Persian and European paintings in terms of composition, proportion, colour symbolism and references to myth. Yet it also provides the intellectual contexts of Islamic cultures which inform our perceptions of how this visual language works. The author uses salient aspects of critical theory, anthropology and theology to sensitise viewers to the diversity and difference of cultural readings but never loses sight of the primacy of the visual and formal characteristics, gestures, geometrical structures and their cooperation with myths and theologemes. The book provides access to one of the world’s major visual traditions whose characteristics continue to inform and elucidate Indian and Islamic contemporary thought today. Images of Thought is a major, scholarly and provocative contribution not only to our understanding of cultural individuality but it offers important examples of how to engage in transcultural understanding and ways of seeing.
