A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c20.s1.25

c20.s1.25

The same idea dominated the Persian artists and their Indian imitators at Akbar's court. Abūl Fazl, accordingly, devotes Āīn 34 of his *Institutes of Akbar* to the discussion of the 'Arts of Writing and Painting', passing naturally from the account of calligraphic systems summarized above to the invaluable notice of the early history of Indo-Persian painting, which forms our only source of knowledge of the subject other than the information to be gleaned laboriously by minute study in detail of individual works. M. Huart sums up the close relations between calligraphy and Asiatic painting in the phrase:—'En Orient la miniature n'est que la servante de la calligraphie.' The phrase, however, is not applicable to the ancient Hindu schools of painting, which, except in so far as they may have been influenced by Chinese and Persian ideas, were independent of the scribe's art. None of the many varieties of the square Brahmī or Sanskrit script ever tempted the calligraphist to regard his manuscript as a picture, nor did anybody dream of collecting specimens of writing in that script merely for the sake of their beauty.