A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c15.3

c15.3

The preservation of numerous specimens of Hindu pictorial art from 1570 is due to the introduction by Akbar of the practice of painting small pictures on paper, which were collected in albums or as book illustrations and preserved in royal and princely libraries, so richly stocked that the comparatively small remnant saved from destruction amply serves the purpose of the historian of art. I am not aware of any evidence that similar libraries filled with illuminated manuscripts had been formed before Akbar's time by either the Hindu princes or the Sultans of Delhi. Humāyun, Akbar's father, possessed a library which must have been incorporated in the Mughal imperial collections. Most of the mediaeval Hindu painting probably was executed in the form of 'Indian fresco' on the walls of temples and palaces. Work of the kind is extremely perishable, unless when applied to the walls of secluded caves such as those of Ajaṇṭā and Bāgh. The older Hindu palaces having almost all disappeared, and many hundreds of the ancient temples in Northern India having been destroyed by order of idol-hating Muslim sovereigns, no specimen of mediaeval Hindu fresco survives that can be called ancient.