Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c13.9

c13.9

From this and other sources the material was brought which formed the foundations of the Persian illustrator’s art. But it was not until the twelfth century that we meet with the first actual examples of his brush, in a group of rare manuscripts executed at Baghdad, Wasit, and Basrah on the Tigris. By this time the descendants of the Arabs who had destroyed the empire of the Sasanids had in their turn established their own magnificent cities in Mesopotamia, where, under the sumptuous rule of the Caliphs, art again flourished. The few pictures that have survived from this early period are in a distinctive style, and have been broadly referred to as Arab or Primitive. Although some of these date from the twelfth century, the best work was produced under the Abbasid Caliphs of Baghdad in the thirteenth century. One famous manuscript is Schefer’s Hariri,¹ prepared in A. D. 1237, from the numerous illustrations of which it is possible to realize fully the character of the Arab or Primitive style. One sees in these pictures a determined effort on the part of the artists to pick up the threads of pictorial art again, especially the representation of human and living forms, after the first destructive period of the Arabs had passed. The style of workmanship is crude and archaic, but the compositions are full of spirit and vigour, being graphic illustrations of the life and appearance of the people of the time. The Arabs had no traditional pictorial art of their own, and accordingly drew upon the art of other people for their material, and utilized craftsmen from other countries to assist them in giving expression to their ideas. In the Hariri pictures therefore, while much may be discerned that is genuinely indigenous, there is also much that has been borrowed from other schools. Where the artist was engaged in representing scenes from desert life, the intimate knowledge of the Arab is plainly visible, in his drawing of the horse and the camel, the ass and all beasts of burden; in his truthful delineation of these, the Mesopotamian illustrator has rarely been excelled. But blended with this ingenuous naturalism are stiff and studied elements from a remote classical source, copied from contemporary Byzantine art, and transformed in a variety of ways to comply with the requirements of the Caliph’s creed. The nimbus, the saintly vestments, columned porticoes, and many other accessories associated with the mosaics of the basilicas, were introduced into these Islamic manuscripts by the adaptable hands of Syrian Christian illuminators engaged by the Abbasids to work under their orders. The treatment of the vestments in these Arab pictures shows how the exquisite drawing of the Greeks had by constant copying become so conventionalized as to lose all resemblance to drapery and to assume the appearance of the petals of a flower or the vein markings of a leaf. It is, however, in their occasional reminiscences of the art of the Buddhists that these Abbasid manuscripts have a special interest, thus showing that the influence of the fresco painting of India had reached not only to Turkestan in the north and China in the east, but as far as Baghdad in the west. We see dark-skinned monks in Indian garments, with haloes, posed in the Buddha attitudes, seated in Arab bazaars, their features and clothing contrasting strongly with the Semitic profiles and gown-like costumes of the other people in the picture. These are followed by more Indian figures in coloured loin-cloths, gold bangles around their wrists, gathered around a shrine and looking as if they had stepped down from the walls of Ajanta itself.