Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c21.17.3

c21.17.3

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 ’.