CategoriesCultural and Religious Styles
Mughal Art
Painting, architecture and luxury arts of the Mughal emperors of South Asia, from Akbar's workshops to the white marble of Shah Jahan.
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About
The Mughal emperors ruled much of South Asia from 1526, and their courts of the 16th to 18th centuries fused Persian, Indian and, later, European ideas into a new art. Humayun brought painters from Safavid Iran, and under Akbar (reigned 1556–1605) a large imperial workshop joined their refinement to the energy of Indian artists such as Basawan and Daswanth. An early great project, the Hamzanama (about 1562–77), illustrated an adventure epic on some 1,400 large cloth pages.
Jahangir preferred single paintings for albums: Ustad Mansur recorded birds and animals with naturalist precision, and Bichitr and Abu'l Hasan painted the emperor in allegories with halos and European-style cherubs. Architecture moved from the red sandstone of Humayun's Tomb and Akbar's city of Fatehpur Sikri to the white marble of Shah Jahan's reign, when the Taj Mahal was built for his wife Mumtaz Mahal. Look for pietra dura, flowers inlaid in coloured stone.