Yael Rice
ARS ORIENTALIS
Abstract
Tis article explores late sixteenth-century Mughal attitudes towards Persian illus trated manuscripts of earlier provenance, taking as a case study the Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh (Compendium of chronicles) in the Raza Library in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh. Copied in Tabriz in the fourteenth century, the Rampur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh was embellished at one or more courts of Iran and Central Asia during the 34eenth and possibly six teenth centuries before it 3nally ended up in the hands of Akbar’s artists during the 1590s. 2e manuscript thus functions as a palimpsest, bearing text in a fourteenth century hand and eighty-two paintings dating from a span of almost three centu ries. Some Mughal-period compositions in the manuscript even incorporate and build around fragments of paintings dating from the 34eenth century and perhaps earlier. In focusing on these works in particular, this article considers how Mughal painters constructed a distinctive artistic idiom upon and through layers of the past.
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IT
WOULD NOT BE AN EXAGGERATION TO SAY that the Mughal emperor Akbar (1542–1605) was possessed of an
historical impulse. During his nearly
34y-year tenure on the throne (reigned 1556–1605), he commissioned
multiple dynastic histories in Persian,
including the Akbarnāma, a chronicle of his own
reign; the Ta’rīkh-i khāndān-i timūriyya, a history of the Timurid
lineage up to the Mughals; and the
Ta’rīkh-i al0, a history of the 3rst Muslim millennium that begins with the Prophet Mu«ammad’s death and
concludes with Akbar’s reign. Akbar also
ordered the translation of Arabic- and Sanskrit-language histories into Persian. Even the memoirs of Babur
(1483–1530), the founder of the dynasty and
Akbar’s grandfather, found a new life in the o5cial court language.1
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| Birth of Ghazan Khan, from a manuscript of the Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh by Rashīd al-Dīn (1247–1318) India, Mughal, "+ 1004/1596 '#. Watercolor on paper. Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, Jerome Wheelock Fund, 1935.12. Photograph courtesy Worcester Art Museum. |
Many of these works were lavishly and copiously illustrated in a recognizably Mughal idiom that, as a number of scholars have noted, departs signi3cantly from the Timurid, Safavid, Jain, and Sultanate painting traditions to which Akbar’s art ists were heir.2 2is divergence from established and no doubt familiar modes of representation and pictorial cycles may be explained in part by the nature of the texts themselves. Many of them, such as the Ta’rīkh-i al0, had been only recently composed. 2us Akbar’s artists had no codi3ed program of illustration to which to turn.3 2e painters charged with illustrating the Razmnāma (Book of war), a Persian rendering of the Mahabharata produced at Akbar’s court in the early 1580s, found themselves in a similar predicament. Although the sacred epic predated the Mughals by many centuries, an illustrative program had not been established in the form of a codex. With no immediate models at hand, Akbar’s artists were com pelled to compose a corpus of narrative images anew and afresh, o4en with spec tacular results.4
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Birth of Ghazan Khan, Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh, p. 268, here dated to 15th or 16th century. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 133 x 270 mm. Raza Library, Rampur. Photograph from Barbara Schmitz and Ziyaud-Din A. Desai, Mughal and Persian Paintings and Illustrated Manuscripts in the Raza Library, Rampur, pl. 259. |
But what about cases where precedents did exist and where prototypes were available? A Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh (Compendium of chronicles) dated ah 1004/1596 ce (Gulistan Palace Library, Tehran, and dispersed to other collections) presents just such a problem.5 Although the royal library possessed an earlier illustrated copy of this text (Raza Library, Rampur, P.1820), Mughal court artists chose to envision history through their own distinctive artistic framework, dispensing entirely with the model even when there was an overlap in subject matter (compare, e.g., 3gs. 1 and 2).6 What drove this decision? Further, what does this impulse towards “the new” say about Mughal attitudes about the past?
Tis older illustrated Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh, today housed in the Raza Library in Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, o7ers a unique framework through which to explore some of these questions. 2e manuscript bears paintings executed at the Mughal court during the 1590s, as well as paintings dating from the sixteenth, 34eenth, and possibly fourteenth centuries (3gs. 3 and 4). In some cases, images from two di7erent periods are combined on a single page (3g. 5).7 2e Rampur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh is a fascinating testimony to artistic reuse; it is also, however, in a state of disarray. A full codicological study of the manuscript remains to be done; my comments here are preliminary and shall remain focused primarily on establishing a rough time
line
for the production of a select number of the illustrations. Conclusions
drawn from this exercise indicate the
Mughal-period paintings in the Rampur manuscript were painted in an idiom that is
distinguished from—rather than imitative of— older exemplars. Akbar’s painters
may have done this deliberately because they saw artistic style as a kind of historical
imprint or trace. By including their own distinc tive images into the Rampur
manuscript, they sought to insert their patron and his family into an esteemed Mongol lineage, while
at the same time they underscored
Akbar’s role as a mujaddid (renewer of faith) who would usher in a new age.8 2e Rampur manuscript was copied in Persian, in naskh script, probably dur ing the second half of the fourteenth century. It draws from the Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh’s 3rst volume, the history of the Mongol rulers, beginning with the Qipchaq princes and ending with the birth of Ghazan Khan.9 2e manuscript’s corpus of images— eighty-two paintings in total—poses a challenge. 2ey are stylistically and tempo rally disparate, and their state of preservation varies, which may explain in part why the Rampur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh had been relatively neglected by Mughal schol ars until recently. Barbara Schmitz and Ziyaud-Din A. Desai’s 2006 catalogue of Enthronement scene, Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh, p. 66, 1590s. Opaque watercolor on paper, 390 x 270 mm. Raza Library, Rampur. Photograph by author.
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Enthronement of Buraq Khan, Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh, p. 58, 15th or 16th century. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 202 x 270 mm. Raza Library, Rampur. Photograph by author. |
the Mughal and Persian paintings and illustrated manuscripts in the Rampur Raza Library ameliorated this situation.10 According to Schmitz’s calculations, the Ram pur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh was copied and furnished with a select number of illustrations in the mid- or later part of the fourteenth century in Iran. She attributes a second painting campaign to the Herat court of the Timurid prince Sulßān- usayn Mīrzā (1438–1506), i.e., circa 1470 to 1490. A third and 3nal phase of illustration, Schmitz posits, can be attributed to the patronage of the Mughal emperor Akbar. 2e author dates these paintings to circa 1590 to 1595.
Many of Schmitz’s attributions are fairly straightforward. More problematic is a group of paintings that Schmitz describes as being in a “Mughal historicizing style,” which she also dates to circa 1590 to 1595 (3gs. 2 and 6). While these works appear to date from a single phase of production, as is evidenced by the similarities in facial and body types as well as by the presence of a common type of male head dress, they bear no resemblance to the more recognizably Mughal additions to the manuscripts (compare 3gs. 3 and 6). Why would Akbar’s artists execute paintings in two di7erent historicized styles, one clearly in a Mughal mode, the other bearing no resemblance to anything known to have come out of the royal workshop at that time? Further, if these paintings were indeed produced at the Mughal court, why is there so little compositional overlap in images depicting the same subjects in the 1596 Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh?
In fact, these “historicized” paintings seem to share a closer formal relationship with paintings produced in Tabriz and Herat during the fourteenth and 34eenth centuries than with Mughal painting of the 1590s. 2e double-page enthronement scenes, for example, clearly echo Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh compositions found in the Diez mughal interventions in the rampur jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh
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Enthronement of Temür Öljeitü, Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh, p. 152, 15th or 16th century, with Mughal additions of 1590s. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 388 x 270 mm. Raza Library, Rampur. Photograph by author. |
Albums
(Staatsbibliothek, Berlin, Mss. Diez A fols. 70–72) and in Hazine 2153 in the Topkapı Palace Library, Istanbul.11
Some
of the Rampur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh paintings also 3nd a curious parallel in early 34eenth-century Timurid manuscript
painting, in what has been dubbed the
so-called historical style.12 For example, the enthronement scene in an
anthology dated ah 813/1410 ce (Museu
Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon, L.A. 161, fol. 260v) and made for Iskandar Sulßān (1384–1415) in
Shiraz clearly recalls images of simi
lar
subjects in the Rampur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh.13 A compelling link is also found
in the illustrative program of a Jāmi‘
al-tavārīkh (Bibliothèque nationale de France,
Paris, Ms. Supp. Pers. 1113) that Francis Richard has convincingly
attributed to the patronage of the
Timurid prince Bāysunghur (1397–1433) at Herat.14 Indeed, the Rampur birth scene clearly seems to follow
the Paris painting of the same subject,
or vice versa, with the mother, wet nurse, astrologers, and attendants
depicted in strikingly similar poses
(3gs. 2 and 7). 2ere is, moreover, an obvious formalistic connection between the two manuscripts’
representations of the siege of Baghdad,
which also evidently share a relationship with a depiction of the same
scene in one of the Diez Albums.15
A
third Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh, now housed in the Asiatic Society of Bengal in Cal
cutta (Ms. D31), 3nds so many links with the Rampur manuscript—in terms of composition and even folio size—that it is
di5cult to believe the two were not once
housed in the same royal collection-workshop. In some cases, a nearly
one-to-one relationship exists between
the images.16 Dating the Calcutta manuscript is another matter altogether. In an article written in
1954, Basil Gray proposed a date some-
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| Enthronement scene, Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh, p. 70, here dated to 15th or 16th century. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 392 x 310 mm. Raza Library, Rampur. Photograph by author |
where
in the late fourteenth century, or at least prior to the Bibliothèque
nationale Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh.17 Barbara
Brend has more recently suggested it was produced in the mid-sixteenth century, perhaps at the
court of Akbar or that of his father,
Humayun (1508–1556).18
To
complicate the issue further, a Tavārīkh-i guzīda-i nusratnāma (Selected histories of the book of victory) (British
Library, London, Or. 3222) that was
probably copied and illustrated in Transoxiana during the 1560s also
shares an uncanny relationship with some
of the “historicized” illustrations in the Rampur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh.19 2e manner of rendering
headgear, 3gures, and thrones in the
British Library Tavārīkh-i guzīda-i nusratnāma, for example, 3nds an echo in some of the Rampur manuscript’s
paintings.20 2is correspondence between
the two manuscripts compels consideration of the possibility that some
portion of the Rampur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh
was illustrated in an archaizing mode, either in Samarqand or Bukhara, during the
mid-sixteenth century.21 2is tantalizing line
of inquiry warrants further investigation that is unfortunately beyond
the scope of this study.
Unraveling
the complex web of relations among the Rampur, London, Calcutta, Paris, and Lisbon manuscripts, moreover,
remains to be done. I raise the issue of
their association primarily to demonstrate that the “historicized”
paintings in ques tion belong to an artistic tradition concerned with imitation
(from Iran or Central Asia, probably
dating from the late fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth century), and as such the works stand apart from late
sixteenth-century Mughal frameworks of
image-making.
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Birth of Ghazan Khan, Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh, fol. 210v, 1420s. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris, Ms. Supp. Pers. 1113. Photograph courtesy Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. |
Several scholars have raised the issue of repetition and imitation in manu script painting from the Timurid and Safavid courts.22 Regarding Persian albums of paintings, drawings, and calligraphies, David J. Roxburgh writes: “Creativity in calligraphy and depiction involved the recreation of models and depended on the practitioner’s ability to assimilate and synthesize a series of performances. 2ere was no anxiety of in:uence.… 2e viewer’s reception of any calligraphy, painting, or drawing—no less than for poetry—involved the anticipation of ancestry, even if speci3c models could not be recalled in visual memory.”23 2e Persian art of depic
tion
was thus, in a sense, always palimpsestic. 2is interest in the imitation of
older models is evident not only in
mid-sixteenth-century Safavid albums but also in manuscripts made for Timurid princes in
Shiraz, Herat, and Samarqand during the
34eenth century.
At the Mughal court during the 1590s, on the other hand, the production and appreciation of images were, to a great degree, predicated upon the marked expansion of a known visual corpus.24 Whereas the Persian court painting tra ditions conceived the manuscript page as a frame or anchor to contain discrete, codi3ed pictorial units drawn from a relatively 3nite vocabulary of images, the Mughal visual lexicon was potentially endless, expanded inde3nitely by the rise of a descriptive mode of depiction that privileged unique physiognomic likenesses and depictions of contemporary and near-contemporary events. 2is distinction between Persian and Mughal painting practices suggests these traditions were not just stylistically distinct but were even systemically di7erent, informed by contrast ing attitudes towards the function of images and the problem of vision. Certainly, as Eleanor Sims has shown, Mughal artists in the sixteenth century drew inspiration for compositional formulas from earlier materials, especially illustrated Timurid manuscripts, but one-to-one copying is rare.25 2e Mughal case, moreover, evinces another kind of approach towards models and precedents, one in which the mate rials of the past were treated as traces of a historical moment, intrinsically distinct from the present. In this artistic system, imitation did not necessarily carry the weight that it did at the Safavid and Timurid courts.
Many
of the Mughal paintings in the Rampur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh, even when executed in a vaguely historicizing mode,
depart both stylistically and compo sitionally from the older images in the
same manuscript (compare 3gs. 3 and 6).
2e illustrations in the 1596 Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh likewise diverge from
models that would have been available in
the Rampur manuscript (see 3gs. 1 and 2). At the same time, Akbar’s artists le4 many of the Rampur
manuscript’s older paintings relatively
unaltered. 2is comes as a bit of a surprise. As John Seyller and others
have dem onstrated, court artists were actively engaged in repainting and
augmenting pre and early Mughal illustrations and narrative cycles, with the
Cleveland ūßīnāma
Tis variability in the reception of illustrated manuscripts may be explained in large part by the historical nature of the materials. Descended from both Timurid and Mongol stock, the Mughals celebrated their lineage, stressing in particular their relationship to the famed ruler Timur (1336–1405), in order to legitimize dynastic claims. In addition to manuscripts, they also collected gems and jades known to have a Timurid provenance. Into these rubies and emeralds, Akbar and Jahangir—as well as their successors—had their names inscribed next to those of esteemed Timurid forebears, a practice analogous to their marking of the :yleaves of Timurid manuscripts with royal seals and records of inspections. Both of these inscriptional acts provided a means to mark physical presence and underscore a genealogical proximity.32 Augmenting these same manuscripts with Mughal paint ings served a similar purpose by imprinting the prized, historical object with dis tinctively contemporary traces. 2us, by supplementing what were likely perceived to be Timurid and possibly earlier Mongol paintings with new iterations, Akbar’s artists literally inserted the Mughals into a revered history. Historical continuity is demonstrated not so much through stylistic or formal a5nities as through the shared use—and evidence of shared use—of the same objects.
The question of overpainting in the Rampur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh still requires fur
ther exploration. Scienti3c analysis may reveal that some of the full-page
Mughal additions were executed on top of
late fourteenth- or 34eenth-century images.
Even if this is the case—and this remains to be shown—other examples in
the man uscript indicate Mughal artists were less interested in covering up
older paintings than in employing them
as points of comparison (see 3gs. 5 and 8). In a Mughal period illustration of
Temür Öljeitü’s court, for example, the artist(s) incorporated an older depiction of Mongol 3gures into the
composition, as if to draw attention to
some intrinsic di7erence between the two modes of representation (3g. 5).
In style and type, the image of the
Mongol couple recalls similar depictions from Diez Album A (fol. 71, S.63).332e truncated,
cropped appearance of the Rampur image
suggests it, like the couples in the Diez Album, may have originally
operated as a discrete entity, enclosed
by a gold and colored ruling.34 At the Mughal court during the 1590s, however, the stand-alone image was
incorporated into a larger narrative
composition.
The fgures, however, have not been fully integrated into that larger composi tion.
Although a faint sketch suggests one of the Mughal artists considered paint ing
a background around the Mongol 3gures, this project never came to
fruition. Instead, the older
image—untouched and le4 in its original state—appears to hover within the compositional space, its
crisp outlines and spare palette starkly
visible against the colorful and tonal Mughal surround. Far from
attempting to elide such discrepancies,
the Mughal artists in these two instances instead chose to make these very di7erences a primary focus.
Again, the Mughal painting practice of
the late sixteenth century departs signi3cantly from the Persian. Contrast
and disjunction, rather than imitation,
3gured as foundational principles.35 In this way, Mughal artists inserted themselves into a
historical lineage, not through imitation
but by underscoring the very qualities that di7erentiated their own work
from that of the past—but to what end?
The historical nature of the text and its illustrations is certainly signi3cant. As opposed to a poetic work, such as the Khāmsa of NiΩāmī (1141–1209) or even the Shāhnāma, the Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh, like a work such as Sharaf al-Dīn ‘Alī Yazdī’s
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| Enthronement scene, Jāmi‘ altavārīkh, p. 32, 15th or 16th century, with Mughal additions of 1590s. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 395 x 271 mm. Raza Library, Rampur. Photograph by author. |
afarnāma,
chronicled a historical dynasty of the not-so-distant past, a dynasty that was an ancestor to the Mughals. 2is may
explain why these older images in the
Rampur manuscript were preserved, especially if it was believed the depic tions
themselves dated from an earlier, fourteenth-century Ilkhanid moment. Many scholars have observed that descriptive
painting—portraiture and studies of :ora
and fauna, for example—came to 3gure centrally at the Mughal court, espe cially
during the later decades of Akbar’s reign. An accurate likeness was not
the sole objective; equally important
was that the depiction had been taken from life. 2e descriptive image was thus understood as a
document of a real encounter. I would
suggest, then, that these older images in the Rampur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh
were approached in a similar manner, as
indices of a historical encounter. 2e fact that
the paintings depicted esteemed ancestors of the Mughals made them even
more poignant.
While Mughal artists historicized their additions to the Rampur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh to some extent, their larger project was predicated upon evoking con trasts with earlier paintings in the manuscript. By doing so, they emphasized the unique historicity of each act of depiction, serving, in a way, to underscore the con temporaneity or “newness” of the Mughal artistic idiom. 2is practice may 3nd its corollary, or even its impetus, in the millenarian tone that colored Akbar’s reign to such a degree that the Ta’rīkh-i al0 even proclaimed him to be the Mujaddid-i alf-i thānī (Renewer of the second millennium).36 In this way, the Rampur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh presented Mughal artists with a unique opportunity to convey in artis tic terms the role of their patron as the reviver of Islam and the herald of a new millennial cycle. At the same time, in the process of pairing older and modern paintings (both from folio to folio and on the same page), Akbar’s artists made a visual argument connecting the Mughal present to a Timurid and Mongol past.37 Indeed, this was also an act of emulation, but one achieved through subtle and not so-subtle juxtapositions rather than through imitation and repetition. With its range of image types, the Rampur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh manuscript as a whole tells the story of shi4s in artistic practice and, as such, serves as a register of how images generate meaning for both practitioners and patrons.
Yael Rice, PhD (2011) in history of art, University of Pennsylvania, is the Five Col lege Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Islamic Art at Amherst College and Hampshire College. Her publications include studies of European engravings and Persian cal ligraphic specimens in Mughal royal albums, the 1598–99 Mughal Razmnāma (Book of war), and an early 34eenth-century Khāmsa (Quintet) of Ni āmī copied and illustrated in the region of Fars, Iran. Her current research concerns physi ognomic analysis as a courtly and artistic practice, Mughal depictions of imperial dreams, and the cultural and material history of jade in early-modern Central and South Asia. E-mail: yaelrice@gmail.com
Notes
The early fifteenth-century Timurid courts
also saw a rise in the production of
histories and genealogies, a trend that
Akbar’s own initiatives appear to echo.
See John E. Woods, “2e Rise of Timurid
Historiography,” Journal of Near Eastern
Studies 46, no. 2 (1987), pp. 81–108; and David J. Roxburgh, Persian Album, 1400–1600: From Dispersal to Collection (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 130–32.
2
2e development of a Mughal style of
painting during the sixteenth century has been the subject of a number of art historical studies. For a range of
di7ering opinions and approaches, see
Pramod Chandra, 1e Tuti-nama of the
Cleveland Museum of Art and the Origins
of Mughal Painting (Graz: Akademische
Druck und Verlagsanstalt, 1976); Milo
Cleveland Beach, Early Mughal Painting
(Cam bridge: Published for the Asia Society by
Harvard University Press, 1987); Priscilla P. Soucek, “Persian Artists in Mughal India: In:uences and Transformations,” Muqarnas 4 (1987), pp. 166–81; John Seyller, “Overpainting in the Cleveland Tutinama,” Artibus Asiae 52, no. 1–2 (1992), pp. 283–318; Humayun’s Garden Party: Princes of the House of Timur and Early Mughal Painting, ed. Sheila Canby (Bombay: Marg, 1994); Aboulala
Soudavar,
“Between the Safavids and the Mughals:
Art and Artists in Transition,” Iran 37
(1999), pp. 49–66; and John Seyller et
al., 1e Adventures of Hamza (Washington,
DC: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M.
Sackler Gallery, Smithso nian Institution, 2002).
3
2e degree to and manner by which
pictorial cycles in manuscripts became
codi3ed, and the role that such programs
played in the production of later
illustrative
projects, deserves further examination,
but it is unfortunately beyond the scope
of this study.
4
On the illustrative program of the circa
1582–86 Razmnāma (Maharaja Sawai
Man Singh II City Palace Museum,
Jaipur) and its relationship to other
Mughal Razmnamas of the sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries, see John
Seyller, “Model and Copy: 2e Illustra tion of 2ree ‘Razmnāma’
Manuscripts,” Archives of Asian Art 38
(1985), pp. 37–66; and Asok Kumar Das,
“Notes on Four Illustrations of the
Birla Razmnama and their Counterparts in
other
Razmnama
Manuscripts,” in Arts of Mughal India:
Studies in Honour of Robert Skelton, ed.
Rosemary Crill et al. (Ahmedabad: Mapin
Publishing, 2004), pp. 67–79.
5
2e bulk (ninety-eight illustrations) of
the 1596 Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh remains in the Gulistan Palace Library, Tehran (no. 2254); individual paintings previously removed from the manuscript can be found in museum and library collections in Europe and North America. For a selection of illustrations from the
Tehran portion, see Hana Kńižková and
Jiří Marek, 1e Jenghiz Khan Miniatures
from the Court of Akbar the Great,
trans. Olga Kuthanová (London: Spring
Books, 1963), as well as Golestan Palace
Library: A Portfolio of Miniature
Paintings and Calligraphy (Tehran: Zarin
and Simin Books, 2000), pp. 141–53; and
for a preliminary list of dispersed
paintings from the manuscript, see Milo
Cleveland Beach, 1e Imperial Image:
Paintings for the Mughal Court (1981;
revised and expanded, Washington, DC:
Freer
Gallery
of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian
Institution, 2012), p. 82.
6 Interestingly, the pictorial cycles of imperial copies of the Bāburnāma— which, like the Razmnāma, had only recently been composed (or more accurately, rendered into Persian from the original Chaghatai)—do in fact share a close relationship to each other, a point that Seyller attributes to the “dynastic and
political importance” of these manu scripts (“Model and Copy,” p. 50). One would assume that the Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh was similarly signi3cant for Akbar, and yet his artists elected to maintain a distance between their own illustrations to this text and those available in the earlier Rampur manuscript. On the pictorial cycles of imperial Bāburnāma manuscripts, see Ellen Smart, “Paintings from the Baburnama: A Study of 16th Century Mughal Historical Manuscript Illustration,” PhD diss., University of London, 1977; and Smart, “Yet Another Illustrated Akbari Baburnama Manu script,” in Facets of Indian Art: A
Symposium
held at the Victoria and Albert Museum,
ed. Robert Skelton et al.(New Delhi:
Heritage Publishers, 1987), pp. 105–15.
7
I would like to thank David J. Roxburgh
for reminding me of a parallel practice of “layering” in Ilkhanid manuscripts collected by the Timurids, e.g., Hazine 1653 and Hazine 1654. See Richard Ettinghausen, “Some Paintings in Four Istanbul Albums,” Ars Orientalis 1
(1954), pp. 91–103; Güner İnal, “Some
Minia tures of the Jami al-Tawarikh in Istanbul, Topkapı Museum, Hazine Library no. 1654,” Ars Orientalis 5 (1963), pp.
163–75;
and Roxburgh, 1e Persian Album, chapter
3, especially pp. 130–47. 8 I have examined the question of artistic agency at the Mughal court during this period, and especially during the early seventeenth century, in “2e Emperor’s Eye and the Painter’s Brush: 2e Rise of the Mughal Court Artist, ca. 1546–1627,” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2011.
9 2e Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh was initially conceived as a history of the Mongols. Its author, Rashīd al-Dīn FaΩl-Allāh Hamadānī (1247–1318), began the work at the behest of Ghazan Khan (r. 1295–1304), the ruler of the Ilkhanate in Tabriz. Rashīd al-Dīn later expanded the text under Ghazan Khan’s successor, Öljeitü (r. 1304–16). In its completed form (no copy of which is known to exist today), the Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh comprised four volumes. 2e 3rst covered the reigns of the Mongol rulers, beginning with Genghis Khan and ending with the death of Ghazan Khan. 2e second dealt with the reign of Öljeitü up to the year 1310 and included a world history of the non-Mongols of Eurasia. 2e third was a genealogy of the Arabs, Jews, Mongols, Europeans, and Chinese, and the fourth volume was a geographical compendium. It was the author’s intention that the Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh be copied in both Arabic and Persian every six months. How many manuscripts were in fact produced remains in question. Rashīd al-Dīn was executed in 1318, and his living quarters were subsequently plundered. Today, only portions of the 3rst three volumes of Rashīd al-Dīn’s Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh survive, while no copies of the fourth volume are known to exist. 2e earliest known copy of the Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh is a fragmentary Arabic manuscript divided between the Edinburgh University Library (Arabic Ms. 20) and the Nasser D. Khalili Collection (MSS 727). Executed between 1306 and 1314 in Tabriz, the two fragments cover sections of volume two, from the pre-Islamic Persian dynasties to the Ghaznavids (Arabic Ms. 20), who ruled most of Khwarazm from 975 to 1187; and (MSS 727) the histories of Islam, China, India, and in small part, the Jews. For a comprehensive analysis of this early, fragmentary Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh, see Sheila S. Blair, A Compendium of Chronicles: Rashid al-Din’s Illustrated History of the World (London: Nour Foundation, 1995).
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10
Barbara Schmitz and Ziyaud-Din A. Desai,
Mughal and Persian Paintings and
Illustrated Manuscripts in the Raza
Library, Rampur (New Delhi: Rampur
Raza Library and Indira Gandhi National
Centre for the Arts, 2006), pp. 171–79.
11
On the Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh images in Diez
Albums folios 70–72, see M. Ş. Ipşiroğlu, Saray-Alben: Diez’sche Klebebände aux den Berliner Sammlungen (Wiesbaden, 1964), pp. 17–18; Blair, Compendium of Chronicles, pp. 93–98; David J.
Roxburgh, “Heinrich Friedrich von Diez
and his eponymous Albums: MSS. Diez A,
fols. 70–74,” Muqarnas 12 (1995), pp.
112–36; Karin Rührdanz, “Illustrationen
zu Rašīd al-dīns Ta’rī -i Mubārak-i
Ġāzānī in den Berliner Diez-Alben,” in
L’Iran face à la domination mongole,
études réunies et présentées, ed. Denise
Aigle (Paris, 1997), pp. 295–306;
Stefano Carboni and Linda Komaro7, 1e
Legacy of Genghis Khan: Courtly Art and
Culture in Western Asia, 1256–1353 (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2002),
cat. nos. 17–32; and Julia Gonnella and
Christoph Rauch, eds., Heroische Seiten: Tausend Jahr persiscehs Buch der Könige (Berlin:
Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, 2011), cat.
nos. 18–32.
2e Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh images in Hazine 2153 have been discussed by Beyhan Karamağaralı, “Camiu’t-Tevarih’in bilinmeyen bir nüshasina ait dört minyatür (Four miniatures from an unknown copy of the Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh),” Sanat Tarihi Yıllığı 2 (1966–68), pp. 70–86; Filiz Cağman and Zeren Tanındı, Topkapı Saray Museum: 1e Albums and Illustrated Manuscripts, ed. J. M. Rogers (Boston: Little Brown, 1986), nos. 43–44; and Blair, Compendium of Chronicles, pp. 93–98.
12 Richard Ettinghausen, “An Illuminated Manuscript of Ha3z-i Abru in Istanbul,
Part
I,” Kunst des Orients 2 (1955), pp.
30–44. For a reassessment of this term,
see Roxburgh, Persian Album, pp.
132–33.
13
Illustrated in Blair, Compendium of
Chronicles, 3g. 68.
14
Francis Richard, “Un des peintres du
manuscript Supplément persan 1113 de
l’Histoire des Mongols de Rašīd al-dīn identi3é,” in L’Iran face à la domination mongole, pp. 307–20.
15
2e double-page scene of the siege of
Baghdad (Diez A, fol. 70, S. 7 and 4) is
reproduced in Ipşiroğlu, Saray-Alben, pp. 17–18.
16
Compare, for example, the two manu scripts’ depictions of the enthronement of Chaghatai Khan and his wife (P1820, p. 54; D31, fol. 58v), Qubilai Khan’s soldiers drowning (P1820, p. 107; D31, fol. 105r), and the enthronement of Buraq Khan (P1820, p. 58; D31, fol.
56v). Images from the Asiatic Society of
Bengal manuscript are reproduced in
Basil Gray, “An Unknown Fragment of the
‘Jāmi‘ al-tawārīkh’ in the Asiatic
Society of Bengal,” Ars Orientalis 1
(1954), pp. 65–75, 3gs. 15, 18, and 23;
and for the Rampur images, see Schmitz
and Desai, Mughal and Persian Paintings,
pls.
239–40,
245.
17
Gray, “An Unknown Fragment,” pp. 66–68.
18
Barbara Brend, “A Sixteenth-Century
Manuscript from Transoxiana: Evidence
for a Continuing Tradition in Illustra tion,” Muqarnas 11 (1994), pp.
103–16, especially pp. 108–109.
19
2e Tavārīkh-i guzīda-i nuœratnāma, a
history of the Turkish races up to the
reign of Abū ‘l-Fat« Mu«ammad (ca.
1451–1510), was composed in Chaghatai
during the early sixteenth century. 2e
British Library illustrated copy of this text (Or. 3222) is discussed at length in
Brend, “A Sixteenth-Century Manuscript.”
20
Compare, for example, p. 58 of the
Rampur Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh (illustrated as
3g. 4 here) with folio 50v in Or. 3222
(illustrated in Brend, “A Sixteenth-Cen tury Manuscript,” 3g. 2).
21
As Brend shows, both Or. 3222 and the
Calcutta Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh, like the
Rampur
Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh, share a curious
relationship with fourteenth- and early
34eenth-century illustrated historical
manuscripts from Tabriz and Shiraz.
Together, the three codices may speak to
a broader mid-sixteenth-century archaiz ing trend in manuscript
illustration that, as Brend outlines,
3rst took root in Transoxiana and then
traveled to India. See Brend, “A
Sixteenth-Century
Manuscript,” especially pp. 108–14. 22 See, for example, Ada Adamova, “Repetition of Compositions in Manuscripts: 2e Khamsa of Nizami in Leningrad,” in Timurid Art and Culture: Iran and Central Asia in the Fi5eenth Century, ed. Lisa Golombek and Maria Subtelny (Leiden: Brill, 1992), pp. 67–75; Ada Adamove, “2e Hermitage
Manuscript
of Nizami’s Khamsa Dated 835/1431,”
Islamic Art 5 (2001), pp. 53–132, but
especially pp. 77–78;
Roxburgh,
Persian Album; and David J. Roxburgh,
“Persian Drawings, ca.
1400–1500:
Materials and Creative Procedures,”
Muqarnas 19 (2002), pp. 44–77.
23 Roxburgh, Persian Album, p. 300. 24 As Seyller has shown, Akbar’s artists did not even mine their own creative output from the circa 1582–86 Razmnāma (Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II City Palace Museum, Jaipur) in the produc tion of the now-dispersed 1598–99 Razmnāma (Seyller, “Model and Copy”). Interestingly, the pictorial cycles of imperial copies of the Bāburnāma— which, like the Razmnāma, had only recently been composed (or, more accurately, rendered into Persian from the original Chaghatai)—do in fact share a close relationship to each other, a point that Seyller attributes to these manu scripts’ “dynastic and political impor tance” (“Model and Copy,” p. 50). One would assume that the Jāmi‘ al-tavārīkh was similarly signi3cant for Akbar, and yet his artists elected to maintain a distance between their own illustrations to this text and those available in the earlier Rampur manuscript. On the pictorial cycles of imperial Bāburnāma manuscripts, see Smart, “Paintings from the Baburnama,” and Smart, “Yet
Another
Illustrated Akbari Baburnama
Manuscript,” pp. 105–15.
25 Eleanor Sims, “Ibrahim Sultan’s Illustrated Zafarnama of 1436 and its Impact in the Muslim East,” in Timurid Art and Culture, ed. Golombek and Subtelny, pp. 132–43. Admittedly, one-to-one copying is rare in Timurid manuscripts as well.
26
See Seyller, “Overpainting in the
Cleveland Tutinama,” pp. 283–318; John
Seyller, “Recycled Images: Overpainting
in Early Mughal Art,” in Canby, ed.,
Humayun’s Garden Party, pp. 49–80; and
Laura E. Parodi et al., “Tracing the
History
of a Mughal Album Page in the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art,”
http://www.asianart.com/articles/
mughal/index.html,
accessed March 1, 2011.
27
2e two Mughal-period additions are on
folios 430v and 531r; overpainting (most
likely a repair) also dating from the
Mughal period is evident in the render ing of Bīzhan on folio 180r. For
the most recent and comprehensive
discussion of the Mughal history of RAS
Pers 239, see Barbara Brend and A. H.
Morton,
Muhammad Juki’s Shahnamah of Firdausi (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 2010), pp. 148–75.
28
2e Last Judgment (fol. 5v) is ascribed to
Manohar (act. 1580–1620) and Nanha
(act. 1582–1635), and the picnicking
scene (fol. 6r) to Narsingh (act. late
sixteenth to early seventeenth century).
2e former is reproduced in R. H.
Pinder-Wilson et al., Paintings from the Muslim Courts of India (London: British Museum, 1976), no. 94a. Mughal treatment of manuscripts whose illustrative programs originated in Bukhara have been explored by a number of scholars, most recently by Mika Natif, “2e SOAS Anvār-i Suhaylī: 2e Journey of a ‘Reincarnated’ Manuscript,”
Muqarnas
25 (2008), pp. 331–58.
29
Another manuscript copied by the famed
calligrapher Sulßān ‘Alī of Mashhad, a Dīvān of ā3Ω
(1325/26–1389/90) (British Library,
London, Or. 14139), was remargined with
elaborate «āshiya (border) designs, some
featuring human 3gures, that were added
in the early seventeenth century at
Jahangir’s court. See J. P. Losty, “2e
‘Bute’ Ha3z and the Development of
Border Decoration in the Manuscript
Studio of the Mughals,” 1e Burlington
Magazine 127, no. 993 (1985), pp.
855–56, 858–71.
30
2e manuscript, which is dated ah 872
(1467–68 ce), is in the John Work Garrett Collection, Milton S. Eisenhower
Library, Johns Hopkins University,
Baltimore, Maryland. 2e manuscript’s six
double page paintings are on folios 82v–83r,
115v–116r, 174v–175r, 282v–283r,
359v–360r,
and 449v–450r. 2e Timurid dimensions of
the manuscript are
discussed
in Eleanor Sims, “2e Garrett Manuscript
of the Zafar-Name: A Study in
Fi4eenth-Century Timurid Patron age,” PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1973, pp. 367–75; and in 2omas Lentz and Glenn Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian
Art and Culture in the Fi5eenth
Century
(Washington,
DC: Smithsonian
Institution, 1989), pp. 262, 357. For the manuscript’s a4erlife at the Mughal court, see Michael Brand and Glenn Lowry, Akbar’s India: Art from the Mughal City of Victory (New York: Asia Society Galleries, 1985), pp. 91–92, 150–51. 31 Blair, Compendium of Chronicles, pp. 31–32.
32 Examples of inscribed rubies are reproduced in Manuel Keene with Salam Kaoukji, Treasury of the World: Jewelled Arts of India in the Age of the Mughals (New York: 2ames and Hudson in association with 2e al-Sabah Collec tion), cat. nos. 12.1–12.11. Jahangir’s interest in gems is discussed within a broader framework of royal collecting and political legitimacy in Corinne Lefèvre, “Recovering a Missing Voice from Mughal India: 2e Imperial Discourse of Jahāngīr (r. 1605–1627) in his Memoirs,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50, no. 4 (2007), pp. 452–89, especially pp. 478–80.
33
Reproduced in Carboni and Komaro7,
Legacy of Genghis Khan, 3g. 133.
34
According to Karin Rührdanz (“Illustra tionen zu Rašīd al-Dīns,” pp. 297–98),
the Mongol couples in the Diez Album
may have been created to illustrate genealogi
cal charts in the 3rst volume of the Jāmi‘
al-tavārīkh. 2e Rampur manuscript, as
mentioned previously, also draws from
this 3rst volume of Rashīd al-Dīn’s text.
35
A recent article by Molly Emma Aitken
presents exciting insights into artistic
reuse as well as narrative and formalistic disjunction in paintings and album pages from the Mughal and Rajput courts. See Molly Emma Aitken, “Parataxis and the Practice of Reuse, from Mughal Margins to Mīr Kalān Khān,” Archives of Asian
Art 59 (2009), pp. 81–103.
36
Qazi Ahmad Tattavi and Asif Khan
Qazvini, Tarikh-i Al0 (Millennial
history),
ed. Ghulam Riza Tabatabai Majd, vol. 1
(Tehran: Shirkat-i Intisharat-i ‘ilmi va
farhangi, ah 1382/2003 ce), p. 241. In a
fascinating parallel—though predating
the Ta’rīkh-i al0 by more than one
hundred 34y years—Sharaf al-Dīn ‘Alī
Yazdī applied the title of mujaddid to
Shāhrukh in his afarnāma (Book of
victory), completed around 1425. On the
concept of mujaddid more generally, see
E. van Donzel, “Mudjaddid,” in 1e
Encyclopaedia of Islam, CD-ROM
(Leiden:
Brill, 1999); and in the context of
Timurid and Mughal formulations of
power and legitimacy, see Ahmed Azfar
Moin, “Islam and the Millennium: Sacred
Kingship and Popular Imagination in
Early Modern India and Iran,” PhD diss.,
University of Michigan, 2010.
37 Roxburgh has argued that the coexis tence of a “purposeful anachronism of style” and antiquarian modes of depiction in historical manuscripts created for Shahrukh, Baysunghur, and Ibrahim Sultan during the early 34eenth century served not only to “stress continuity” but also “to make the present seem inevitable, preordained…” (Persian Album, pp. 132–33).
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