Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c21.2

c21.2

T HE occidental, when first confronted with a Mughal miniature, is apt to find himself presented with two conflicting thoughts. On the one hand he sees before him a picture the basis of which is plainly oriental, while on the other there is something strangely familiar in certain of its features, something which recalls the works of the mediaeval artists of his own sphere. He may exclaim, as some have done, ‘an Italian fresco in miniature’, while others, whose first acquaintance with the art has been by means of reproductions, have felt that these were reduced copies of pictures of considerable size, or even large wall-paintings. The latter illusion, as to size and mural character, is readily explained, as the immediate predecessors of the Indian miniaturists were wall painters, decorators of temples and palaces, who worked mainly in *tempera* on the prepared surfaces of buildings. At a still earlier date these again derived their artistic skill from their ancestors, the painters of the expansive frescoes of the Buddhist period. It is not difficult to realize, therefore, the source from which the Indian painters derived those qualities of size and breadth and space which are observable in some degree in all their pictorial art. These fundamental characteristics, dating from the Buddhist times, were handed down from generation to generation and underlie all forms of Indian painting even to the miniatures of the Mughals. But the apparent association with primitive Western art, a reminiscence of Siena and Assisi, or the miniatures of the early Florentine and Umbrian schools of Matteo de Giovanni, of Francesco da Rimini, of Paolo Ucelli, which some have suggested, is less easily explained. It may arise from the fact that both arts were linked, the Italian directly, the Indian indirectly, with the same historic school, that of the Byzantine, with its semi-barbaric but splendid decoration composed of contributions from both the East and the West. While this may be one reason, it also raises the question as to whether the early Italian painters, through the Venetians, whose connexion with the orient in the Middle Ages was a close and constant one, ever gave anything to the graphic art of Persia, and so to that of India. In the year 1479 the Turkish Sultan, Muhammad II, engaged the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini and two assistants to execute a series of pictures for him; evidences of the Italian artist’s sojourn in Constantinople have been noted in a few of the miniatures executed in the Nearer East shortly after that date. Such speculations have, however, little practical value; where we are on more stable ground is the similarity in growth of the Italian and Indian schools. Both, at least in their technical development, progressed broadly on the same lines—from fresco to *tempera*, and from *tempera* to ‘easel-picture’. India, it is true, took longer over the process; its course was delayed, and, on occasion, almost arrested, but it is most probably to this analogy in evolution that the two schools owe some remote resemblance.