Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c21.17

Language: English

c21.17.1

There is one other feature in the picture, taken from European art, which, although referred to in a previous chapter, is of sufficient importance to merit a more detailed description. This is the golden nimbus adorning the head of the Mughal sovereign. In itself it is a comparatively minor detail, but the manner in which it eventually found a place in the Indian miniature is of considerable interest. The story of the travels of this symbol, from Asia to Europe and again back to India, from the earliest times until it appears in the Mughal miniature, is a long and involved one. Here, however, the bare outlines will suffice. The origin of the nimbus is traced to the early Persians, with whom in its embryonic form of a celestial aureole of fire it appears as the *hvareno* of Mazdaism. In its usually accepted shape, however, as a circular disk, it is first seen in the Graeco-Buddhist sculpture of the north-western frontier of India, anciently known as Gandhara, about the beginning of the Christian era. Buddhism having thus appropriated the saintly circle, it was carried with the art of that creed to all the distant countries which accepted the doctrine of the Great Teacher. In India a later and Hinduized form of Buddhism, the *Mahāyāna*, then took over the symbol, from which it was only a step to the Brahmanical art of mediaeval times, so that it appears in the sculptures of that country from then onwards, as an attribute of many of the Indian divinities.

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Such is the account of its first appearance in the art of India. Previous to this, however, it had begun to travel towards the west of Asia, and from there it found its way into the Byzantine art of Europe in the fifth century of the Christian era. At first it was employed somewhat timidly in Christian art, probably on account of its known pagan origin, but in the course of time this objection was overcome, so that it eventually became the accepted emblem of the Byzantine Church, to be used profusely in all its figure art. In the meantime, however, the rise of Islam in the seventh century had swept it completely out of the Nearer East, as the creed recognized no symbols except those of its own making. But the first fanatical outburst having subsided, it begins to be seen again in the illuminated manuscripts of the Abbasid rulers on the Tigris. The reason for its reappearance in this centre of the Muhammadan faith is not far to seek. Greek artists were employed by the Caliphs of Baghdad, who copied it from the pictures of Christian saints in the Byzantine illustrated books which they used as their guide. From the banks of the Tigris it wandered into the mediaeval pictorial art of Persia, even finding a place in the miniatures of the Mongols until the fourteenth century. But after this date it appears no more in the painting of Iran. It ceased to be used by the artists of Persia when that country closed its door on the West and turned to the Far East for its art.

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In none of the pictures of the Timurid or Safavid schools is it seen, except in those rare portraits of the holy family of Islam, or of the saints, when, not in the shape of a halo, but as a golden flame, it distinguishes their sacred persons. It naturally follows, therefore, that in the early painting of the Mughals the nimbus is also unknown, as Akbar’s artists, not seeing it in any examples of Persian art, were unlikely spontaneously to introduce it into their own. But if the use of the emblem had died out in the painting of the East, the omission was fully compensated for by its universal employment in the West. Christian art in the Middle Ages took the nimbus for its own, and utilized it to such an extent that it has been regarded by many as of purely Christian meaning and origin. With the art of this religion to the extreme west of Europe it travelled, and then, in the sixteenth century, in the hands of the Portuguese Jesuit fathers it turned, and began the long journey back almost to the land of its birth, as it figured prominently in the Christian pictures which these priests brought with them to India in the pious hope that such works of art might be the means of converting the ‘ Great Mogul ’.