{"title":"Mughal Miniatures","description":"\u003cp\u003eMughal Miniature painting flourished at the imperial Mughal court in northern India from the mid sixteenth century to the early eighteenth, under the patronage of Humayun, Akbar (r. 1556–1605), Jahangir (r. 1605–1627), Shah Jahan (r. 1628–1658), and Aurangzeb. The tradition was founded by two Persian masters, Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad, who left the Safavid kitabkhana of Shah Tahmasp to follow Humayun back to Delhi in the early 1550s. The synthesis combined Persian compositional refinement with indigenous Indian Rajput and Deccan idioms, and from 1580 onward the European prints brought by the Jesuit missions added a third element of perspectival shading.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eAkbar's atelier of more than a hundred painters produced the major illustrated manuscripts of the reign, including the \u003cem\u003eHamzanama\u003c\/em\u003e on cotton folios between 1567 and 1582, the \u003cem\u003eAkbarnama\u003c\/em\u003e, and the \u003cem\u003eRazmnama\u003c\/em\u003e. The leading court masters were Daswanth and Basawan, both Hindu painters trained under the Persian founders. Jahangir raised portraiture and natural history painting to the centre of court production, with Ustad Mansur as the principal animal and bird painter, and Abu'l-Hasan Nadir al-Zaman as the leading portraitist. Govardhan, Bichitr, and Manohar Das produced the period's finest royal allegorical compositions. Shah Jahan's \u003cem\u003ePadshahnama\u003c\/em\u003e closed the great manuscript phase by mid century. Decline followed under Aurangzeb's reduced patronage, with the late Mughal idiom continuing in the provincial Rajput and Pahari courts of the eighteenth century.\u003c\/p\u003e\n","products":[],"url":"https:\/\/symbolartgallery.com\/collections\/mughal-miniatures.oembed","provider":"Symbol Art Gallery","version":"1.0","type":"link"}