An Akbar-Namah Manuscript

Author(s): E. F. Wellesz
Source: The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, Vol. 80, No. 471 (Jun., 1942), pp. 135-143
Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications, Ltd.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/868602
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On Art and Connoisseurship

applies his pragmatic intelligence to the problems of
connoisseurship-problems which may be historical
(the objective criteria of authorship, for example) or
practical (the analytical examination of pictures, the
use of photographs, etc.) or technical (the detection
of copies, forgeries, and restorations). Dr. Friedlander withholds nothing: he pours out his secrets
for the future use of students and the guidance of
amateurs; and there is no professional worker in
the field of art, be he museum director, expert,
dealer or restorer, who will not read these pages
with great benefit. Particularly rich in observation
and pertinent example is a chapter on "Artistic
Quality: Original and Copy," and a quotation
from it will show how concretely Dr. Friedlander
will illustrate a point under discussion:
" I will try to illustrate by means of an example
the kind of mistake a copyist is liable to make. Before
me there lie two drawings, one the archetype, the
other a close imitation. In the foreground, out of
the earth, there rises a stone across whose base
there extends a wavy mass of sand. The copyist
has erroneously taken the slight, undulating line
for the lower edge of the stone, which now in the
copy is not contained in the soil but, on the contrary,
stands on the ground with an impossible jagged
contour. The ensemble of forms seems in each case
to be almost exactly the same, yet the total effect
is completely different, since the copy has wiped
out the special illusion caused by the position of the
stone behind the wavy mass of sand."
The first and the final test of a book as of a picture
lies in the " facture," and it is perhaps not necessary
to praise a style which is already so famous, and
which preserves all its animation in this translation.
Dr. Friedlander does not write a typical German
style : he is elliptic, aphoristic, witty and objective.
It is the style of a Good European, of a man who, in
this field of art, has modelled himself on Goethe,
Stendhal, Merimee and Baudelaireratherthan on the
academicians. I will conclude by quoting a few of
the hundreds of brilliant aphorismswhich are merely

the high lights on a consistentlyluminous canvas :Van Eyck's eye moved in front of a world at rest;
Manet's eye rested in front of a world in motion.
To emphasize one's personal style means to make
a virtue of necessity.
The artist never loses the feeling of standing before
an insoluble task... If he imagines that he has
reached his goal, he has really come to the end and
stands at that boundary where mannerism begins.
The concept of beauty suffers from an ominous
generalness and painful vacuity.
The indifference with which the painters in the
I9th century allowed their pictures to be framed
produces a sense of distrustfulness.
The real theme of genrepainting is condition, not
event.
Woe to the master who looks at the human face
with the eye of the still-life painter.
Works of art do not speak-they sing.
In front of art the thinkersare mostly blind and the
practising artists mostly dumb.
It is in the nature of a work of art to speak ambiguously, like an oracle.
Intuitive judgment may be regarded as a necessary
evil.
The works belonging to the old age of the greatest
masters all share a sublime and transfigured timelessness.
Genius changes from inner necessity, talent for a
reason.
There do not exist many authors whose literary
capacity is on a level with their understandingof art.
These are enough to prove the self-application
of a remark with which Dr. Friedlander brings his
book to an end: "Descriptions or statements,
elaborate and aiming at completeness, demand too
much of the visual memory of the reader : it is the
aphorisms, throwing light like flashes, which are
above all effective." But it should be added that
Dr. Friedlander has further aided the reader's
visual memory by the choice of forty illustrations,
excellently reproduced in half-tone.

AKBAR-NAMAH
AN
MANUSCRIPT
BY E. F. WELLESZ
hMONGthe items in the Indian Section

\of

the Victoria and Albert Museum

which, very justly, have been most

admired, range the illustrations of an
Akbar-namah, the biography of the
greatest among the emperors of India, written by
Abul Fazl, his first minister and favourite.1
This manuscript, which belongs to the most
outstanding of its time, has already received much
consideration in the literature dealing with the art
of this period ; but the subject is interesting enough
1 The Akbar-namah,transl. by H. BEVERIDGE,
Calcutta.

to justify a new attempt at throwing some further

light on the problems it offers.
The codex is not dated, but it bears a note saying,
that Jahangir, Akbar's son and successor to the
throne of India, placed this volume in the Imperial
Library in the year i605, the date of Akbar's death,
and it shows Jahangir's authentic handwriting
and seal. This allows us two conjectures: one,
that the book, having been formerly in Akbar's
possession, had passed to his son and heir; the
other, which has been suggested by Mr. Percy
Brown,2 that it had formed part of Jahangir's

I35

An Akbar-namahManuscript
library, whilst this prince was heir apparent, and
had been found worthy of being added to the gems
of the Imperial Library after Jahangir's succession
to the throne.
Mr. Percy Brown is led to this conjecture chiefly
through aesthetic considerations; he thinks the
miniaturesinferiorto those of other authentic Akbarmanuscripts and believes them to be copies made
for the heir apparent from an Arkbar-namah
belonging to the emperor. Other writers3 object to this
view and declare the South Kensington Akbarnamahto be on the same artistic level as the other
manuscripts executed for the emperor, a view,
which is definitely the one on which this article
is based.
Most of the picturescontain inscriptions,indicating
by which artists they have been made. These
inscriptions quite obviously are not the authentic
signatures of the artists themselves, but we may
assume, that they are contemporary and written
by some clerk who had to control the amount of
work done by every individual artist in order to let
him have the exact sum of money due to him.4
Most of these inscriptions show the names of two,
sometimes even of three collaborators, one for the
outline, one for the painting, and, in a few cases, a
third for the portraits. This is not the only instance,
in which this method has been adopted, it has also
been used for other manuscripts, to a very wide
and for the
extent for the Bankipore Timur-namah
Jeypore Razm-namah,which seem to belong to one
group as our book; all three not only show a great
affinity of style, but have been painted by practically
the same artists.
Now, the first question we have to ask, is-Do
the names of the artists give any indication as to
the period in which these manuscripts have been
illustrated? They certainly do with a high degree
of probability.
In his well-known chapter on painting, contained
in the Ain-i-Akbari,5
Abul Fazl mentions as the most
the
numerous excellent painters
outstanding among
of Akbar's court the following : Mir Sayyid Ali,
Abdul Samad, Daswanth, Basawan, Kesu, Lal,
Mukund, Muskin Farukh Beg, Madhu, Jagan,
Khem Karan, Tara, Sanwlah, Haribans, Ram.
Now, these same painters took an important part
in the illustrations of our .manuscript. Eight of
them, as a matter of fact, were responsible for the
outline of the greatest number of pictures and
did a great deal of the paintings as well, three
others collaborated merely as painters and only
four artistsmentioned in the Ain do not occur among
2 PERCYBROWN: IndianPaintingunderthe Mughals,Oxford
[1924],
p. 17 ff.
8 E.g. I. STCHOUKINE:La PeintureIndienneJ
I'Epoquedes Grands
Moghols, Paris, 1929 (Appendice).
4The Libraryof A. ChesterBeatty. A Catalogueof theIndianMiniatures.
By SIR THOMASW. ARNOLD,edited and revised by J. V. S.
WILKINSON
[1936]. Introduction, p. xxvi.
6 The Ain-i-Akbari, transl. by Blochmann, Calcutta
[1873], I,
p. 107 ff.

136

those named in the inscriptionsof our manuscript;

namely Mir Sayyid Ali, Abdul Samad, Daswanth
and Haribans.
Now, Mir Sayyid Ali, the great Persian painter,
who, as well as Abdul Samad, followed Akbar's
father, the emperorHumayun, from Persia to India,
had already contributed to the famous Nizami of
the British Museum, dated 1539, for which certainly
only artists of establishedfame were employed, and
must consequently have been a very old man when
the Ain was written. Except for the great picture
of the British Museum Princesof the Houseof Timur,
attributed to him with great plausibility,6we know
only his work on the Hamza-namah,the earliest
illustrated Mogul manuscript, in which he and
Abdul Samad were the leading artists. Abdul
Samad's antecedents in Persia are unknown, he
may have been quite young when he joined Humayun in the middle of the sixteenth century, and a
signed picture of his is, as a matter of fact, contained
in the Vizami of the Dyson Perrins Collection,7
which certainly ranges among the late manuscripts
of the period. But he has not collaborated in any
of the great manuscriptsof the time, which can be
easily explained, if we consider, that since 1577, he
acted as master of the mint, which obviously left
him time to paint miniatures occasionally, but not
to take his part as a leading artist in such a vast
undertaking as the illustrating of the Akbar-namah
actually was. Surely his position would not have
allowed him to play a secondary part, i.e., to be
responsible only for a comparatively small section
of the pictures, as it usually was the case with the
minor painters. Daswanth, on the other hand, who,
according to the Ain, was the greatest among the
Indian painters, was no more among the living,
when this panegyric was written.
So Haribans is the only artist mentioned by Abdul
Fazl, whose absence from a collaboration on our
manuscriptcannot be accounted for; and Haribans
seems to have been either a very unproductiveartist,
or, which is more probable, to have worked to a
great extent on some unknown manuscripts, for his
name occurs hardly ever in the worksfamiliar to us.
All this means an astounding conformitybetween
the literary authority-Abdul Fazl's chapter on
painting-and this individual work of art-the
of the Victoria and Albert Museum.
Akbar-namah
And we may well assume, that we have here
definitely one of the manuscriptsmentioned by the
historian,when he says :8 ",Persianbooks, both prose
and poetry, were ornamented with pictures and a
very large number of paintingswas thus selected....
The Chingiz-namah,
the Zafar-namah,
THIS BOOK,
the
Razm-namah. . . were all illustrated."
The Ain, intended to form a part of the Akbarnamah,which, owing to Abul Fazl's death, had to
6 BROWN: loc. cit. p. 53 and L. BINYON, J. V. S. WILKINSON,B.
GRAY: Persian MiniaturePainting, [193I], p. 119 if.
7 BROWN: loc. cit. pl.

8 Ain-i-Akbari. p. Io8.

xxxvi.

A-4KBAR
WAECHIXG A FIGHE BETWEEW
TWO RELIGIOUS SECT;S FOR A BA THI;&G
PLACE. BY BASAWAN AND TARA.

C-AKBAR WA7-CHIXG
7-HE
7WO
OF HIS FOLLOWERS.
SAN\VALA

OF
LAL ANI)

DRO WXIXG

BY

B-A KBAR WAECHIXG A FIGHT BETWEEW

TWO RELIGIOUS SECES FOR A BA THIXG
PLACE. BY BASAWAN AND AST.

D-AKBAR'S EX7-RS
FARUKH BEG.

PLATE I. AN AKBAR-NAMAHMANUSCRIPT

IJV70

SURA 7-.

1)s1T

DURBSR GIVEW BY AKBAR. I3Y LAL

AND RAM DAS.

A-A

C-A

DURBAR GIVE2Y BY AKBAR. BY JAGAN

AND SURDAS.

B-A DURBAR GIVEWBYAKBAR.

IBRAHIM KAHAR.

D-A

DURBAR GIVEW BY AKBAR. BY JAGAN

AND MADHU.

PLATE II. AN AKBAR-NAMAHMANUSCRIPrl

BY LAL AND

An Akbar-namahManuscript
remain unfinished, was terminated I597-I598,9 and
refers to the institutions as they were about I59010 ;
we may safely assume that the bulk of our illustrations has been done at this time.
The general style is such as to confirm definitely
the accuracy of this statement. It shows the
culmination of the early Mogul style, just before it
begins clearly to develop into its second stage,
which was to last from about the last decade of
Akbar's reign to the beginning of the reign of Shah
Jehan.
As the most characteristical features of this art
for one thing,
the following may be mentioned:
of
the pictures.
the
illustrative
value
stress
on
rising
This is a natural consequence of the emperor's
interest in the producing and illustrating of new or
comparatively new books, whilst the great Persian
patrons were content to see the same books rewritten and re-decorated over and over again with
And
ever increasing perfection and elaboration.
there is no doubt, that in no other illustrations would
historical truthfulness in representing the facts seem
as important to Akbar, as where his own biography
was concerned.
Now experience confirms, what common sense
would anticipate : an increasing interest in historical
and biographical subjects would not only demand
from the artist a keener perception of naturalistic
detail, but gradually lead to a more naturalistic
conception of the whole visible world. And thus
we find as another distinguishing trait of the Mogul
painting of this period a new and more lifelike way
of representing things and persons and of indicating
their mutual relation within the surrounding space.
For now the third dimension begins to be made more
visible than ever before in Islamic painting.
Compared to Persian miniatures of the sixteenth
century, with their softly flowing curves and the
dignified poise of their figures, the Mogul paintings
show a far greater vitality, a predilection for quick
and energetic movement for crowded scenes charged
with action, which mostly lead to a lessened sensibility to the beauty of an ornamentally balanced
composition. The colours too have lost something of
the exquisite harmony of Persian painting, they are
cruder, more variegated and increasingly chosen
from the point of view of obtaining naturalistic
effects.
There is no doubt, that these innovations are partly
due to the emperor's personality, but certainly the
fact, that by now most of the leading artists are
Indian, is at least as important. Again we have to
quote Abul Fazl, for his well known words: " The
best painters are the Indians, they surpass our
conception of things."ll clearly refer to the greater
affinity to nature he finds in the works of Indian
painters if compared to the Persians. And this
affinity to nature in the Akbar paintings shows to a
9 Akbar-namah. p. 378, Note 3.
10 BLOCHMANN: Preface to the Ain-i-Akbari.
11
Ain, p. 107.

great extent the same features, which are characteristic of the most ancient pictorial tradition of
India. We shall have to deal later on with the nature
of this connection.
The leading painters of our manuscript are:
Muskin, who is responsible for the outline of'I9
pictures, then follows Lal with I8, Kesu Kalan
with 15 and Basawan with I5-all of them mentioned in the Ain, as was said before. Now we shall
have to ask a question already put forward by other
writers :12 is it possible to distinguish between the
pictures of the different artists, are the painters to
be recognized as individualities, whose personality
is clearly reflected in their works ? There can, in
any case, be no doubt whatever, that there is a
noticeable difference of quality between the different
illustrations; and we shall find, that, with very few
exceptions, the illustrations signed by he same
artist as are responsible for the outline are on the
same level of workmanship. It is Basawan and Lal,
among the Hindu and Muskin and Farukh Beg
among the Islamic painters, who have attained the
highest degree of perfection; and it is the illustrations executed by them which show to a higher
extent than the others the unmistakable mark of
personality, though in a far more restricted sense,
than Europeans would understand it. Even the
well known method of Lermolieff, which consists in
comparing details, like the formation of the ears,
the nostrils, the fingers, etc., of the different figures
painted by an identical artist, in order to detect a
sort of artistic handwriting, can be applied to our
illustrations only in very few instances. On the
one hand there is, regarding these minor features, an
amazing similarityin the pictures of different artists;
on the other hand-works, the outlines of which have
been executed by one identical master, sometimes
show differences, for which we may perhaps make
the second master responsible,who did the colouring.
But even when several pictures have been entirely
carried out by one artist, painting as well as outline,
they do not always show a greater similarity amongst
themselves, than other pictures, done by quite
different artists, are sometimes apt to display. We
may assume that the oriental habit of doing a great
and elaborate amount of copying after different
schools and masters hinders the development of an
individual " handwriting."
If we are yet able to detect some conformitywithin
the production of certain masters, this conformity
is of a more general kind.
Let us, from this point of view, considera few miniatures,of which Basawanhas done the outline: PLATEI,
A, of which Tara the elder has done the painting and
PLATE I, B 13, on which Asi has collaborated, show
Akbar watchinga Fight betweentwo Religious Sectsfor a

BathingPlace,a fight in which some Mogulshave taken

part. The pictures,going into all the detailsof the text
and displayingall the minutestpeculiaritiesin appear12 At
greater length:
Vienna [I935].

der Akbar-Zeit,
W. STAUDE : Moghul-Maler

I39

An Akbar-namah
Manuscript
ance and costume of the persons concerned, prove the
high illustrative gift of the artist. But where he is
really outstanding among his fellow artists is his ability
to render the human body with thorough understanding
and in full plasticity of form, a plasticity which is achieved
both through the broadening and thinning of the most
expressive outline and through an energetic inner
modelling in dark shades and strongly contrasted lights.
The violent movements, though excessive, are still in
concordance with the possibilities given by life itself.
The faces are varied and full of expression, not only
showing the differences of type, but also the varying
moods and feelings.
In several instances-e.g. in the case of the two
sannyasi with the shellhorns 'in Plate I, A, or of the
dying man with the surrounding ascetics in Plate I, Bhe combines two or more figures into a group, in which
every movement, every contour of the different persons
is so closely connected as to form a complete entity.
Such expressive, highly plastic figures and groups are
also found in other paintings Basawan did in the Akbarnamah,e.g., in a picture, where the emperor is shown
attacking a tigress while several of his men are in grasp
with the cubs.14 There can be no doubt that we are
witnessing here the revival of very ancient Indian
traditions ; for all these different traits-great plasticity
of the human body, achieved through contour and inner
modelling, the strong gestures and expressive faces
sometimes approaching the grotesque-they all can be
traced back to the oldest paintings of India.
Unfortunately there is to be noticed a great inequality
of workmanship-as for instance in the most conventional and lifeless figures in the background of the
hunting scene. It seems, that Basawan has left a great
deal of work to his collaborators, very much to the detriment of his pictures. Not only are the single items
done less carefully, but sometimes even the rhythmical
flow of the whole composition is suddenly interrupted
by the harsher outline, the utterly different attitude of
figures obviously not designed by Basawan himself.
The Battle of the Sannyasi, especially the left part of it, is
a happy exception, and seems to a large' extent to be
executed by the master himself.
The pictures, for the outline of which Lal is responsible,
show a greater uniformity of workmanship. You get
the impression, that he left not much more than the
colouring properly speaking, to the "painter." It is
one of the strong points in Lal, that, among all the
numerous persons of his pictures, none seems to be a
mere super, an uninterested bystander, but that all of
them are taking an active part in the doings of the protagonists. And no figure remains isolated but each
one is, through his gestures and glances, brought into
connection with the others, so that the flowing rhythm of
the composition shows no interruption whatever. He
also shuns to repeat over and again the same gestures
in different figures, as the other painters often do, and
thus evades monotony.
All this may be emphasized by comparing two absolutely analogous scenes, each representing a Durbar

given by Akbar, the one by Lal [PLATEII, A, in collaboration with Ram Das and PLATE II, B, with Ibrahim
Kahar) ; the other by Jagan (PLATEII, C, with Surdas,
PLATE II, D, with Madhu).15
13
14

Victoria and Albert Museum, No. 6i, 62.

V. A. Mus. No. 17.

140

Though this double picture is by no means one of

Lal's best, and merely chosen for the sake of comparison,
it definitely shows the characteristicdisplay of variegated,
but harmonious movements, which bind the figures
together in curved lines, all centred in the main figure,
the emperor.
Obviously the same principle of composition is
followed up by Jagan, but here it is not brought to
anything like the same achievement.
An illustration showing Lal at his best is PLATEI, c
(painting by Sanwala)16. Akbar, having passed the
river on horseback, is witnessing the drowning of two
of his followers. The isolated, ample figure of the
emperor in quiet grandeur is beautifully contrasted to
the wildly gesticulating groups of his men.
Now both the predelection for expressive, even grotesque movements and the way, too, in which all these
violently agitated figures are linked together through
some strange, dancelike rhythms-widely differing from
the more harmonious principles of Persian compositions
-have their antecedents in the old cave paintings of
India. Lal as well as Basawan is deeply rooted in the
tradition of his country, a tradition, which has clearly
lived throughout the centuries, though we are not able
to trace all its different phases.
It has been mentioned before, that in their attempt
to represent facts of real life as clearly and as vividly
as possible, the Mogul painters also gradually deviate
from the conventions adopted by Persianrpainters in
suggesting the third dimension, the dimension of space.
Let us, from this point of view, look at PLATE III,
A, B, which we have to consider as a unity (outline by
Muskin, painting by Bhura and Sarwan). 17.
The subject given is TheSiegeof FortChitorin Rajputana
through Akbar and the momentous event depicted by
the artist on the left side is the explosion of a mine,
whilst on the right the work on fortification and the
firing is going on.
You could not say, that the Indian miniaturist has
completely broken with the Persian way of showing
the foreground as a steeply sloping plane and of using
different points of vision for the different parts of the
picture, so as to give the most complete aspect of things.
This would mean a break with the traditions of his own
country as well, for these same features are typical for
the old Indian wall paintings too. But where the
Mogul artist widely differs from the Persian painter is
the energy which he displays in indicating depth within
the different scenes he combines into one miniature.
The various buildings, the numerous recesses formed
between walls and rocks, are all shown in their cubic
quality and are well adapted for enshrining all animated
and lifeless objects thus indicating the space allotted to
them.
In all this, Muskin follows the same principles, as most
of his fellow artistsdo, for even in the earliest manuscript
these same
of the Mogul school, in the Hamsa-namah,18
15 V. A. Mus. No. 27, 28 (Akbar receivingthe Ambassador
of Shah
Tahmasp,Akbar-namah, trans. Beveridge II, p. 262) V. A. Mus.
No. 95, 94 (Akbar at Dilapur, in I57I, loc. cit. II, p. 528, 529.)
16 V. A. Mus. No.
54, loc. cit. II, p. 419.
17 V. A. Mus. No.
67, 66, loc. cit. II, p. 468. The name of
"Muskin " clearly shows him being a Mahommedan, but this fact
does not by any means prove a Persian descendancy. He may have
belonged to one of the old Islamic tribes of India or even have been
one of the many Hindus who were converted to Islam under the
Mughal regime.

An Akbar-namah
Manuscript
tendencies are already to be noticed and they obviously
are an ancient Indian inheritance.19 But where Muskin
seems to be outstanding among the other masters, who
worked on our manuscript-though they all occasionally
adopt the same devices-is the very clever way in which
he bases his entire compositions on diagonal lines,
which, in binding together the different parts of the
pictures, add to the impression of depth already given
by the different scenes. Furthermore, he disposes,
wherever it is possible, these different scenes of action
on different levels, indicated through the mountainous
inequality of the soil or through architectural devices;
he also makes his "receptacles"-houses, tents, rocks, etc.,
-as well as the single figures and groups overlap, so that
the ground loses a little of its unnatural extension. The
remoteness of the background is clearly indicated
through a tangible difference of size between its details
and those of the foreground, and, comparing his pictures
with those of other painters, we shall detect a better proportion between figures and architecture or landscape.
Two examples, chosen for their similarity of subjectPLATEIII, C21 (outline by Muskin, painting by Sarwan),
representing The Building of Agra, and PLATEIII, D22,
(outline by Tulsi the elder, painting by Bhawani),
showing The Building of FathpurSikri-may emphasize
this difference.
It is obvious, that Muskin, though he is deeply rooted
in Indian tradition, or perhaps just because this trend
is so much stronger in him than the Persian one, was one
of the first Mogul painters who really absorbed the
European influences, which were to become so much
stronger only a few years later; and surely it is not a
mere chance, that very complicated subjects, as the
sieges and assailments of mountain forts, have been
chiefly assigned to Muskin, in the Bankipore Timurnamahas well as in our manuscript. It may be supposed,
that in all these pictures he has also exercised some
influence on the colouring; for they all show much
similarity; and in most of them the clouds of fire and
smoke emanating from guns and cannons help, by
enveloping in a haze the contours of far away things, to
suggest the impression of their remoteness.
Farukh Beg is, in our manuscript, the noblest representative of a different tradition. Coming from Persia,
he has remained true to his origins in the greater poise
of his pictures, in the minuteness of details, in the subtle
harmonies of his colouring. In no other illustrations
of the Akbar-namahdo we meet with such a fine net of
ornaments spread over the architectural features, over
18 H. GLUCK;Die indischen
desHamza-Romanes,
Miniaturen
Zurich,
Vienna,
Leipzig
[I925],
19

Compare the subtle analysis given by ST. KRAMRISCH:A

Surveyof Painting in the Deccan, London, [1937], P. 4 ff.
20 V. A.
Mus., No. 46, Akb. N. II, p. 372.
21 V. A.
Mus., No. 86, Akb. N. II, p. 530.
22 V. A.
Mus., No. I17, Akb. N. II, p. 25, 26.

the garments, harnesses and standards as in PLATEI, D,

Akbar'sEntry into Surat,23and nowhere do the flowers
of the lawns, the stones of the paths, the leaves and
blossoms of the trees form as regular and as ruglike a
pattern as they do here. The figures too have a type
absolutely their own. Of the three pictures he contributed to our manuscript, two, according to the signatures, have been done by him alone whilst in the third
one (Akbar Watchingtwo Fighting Elephants)24only the
portraits have been added by Basawan, a fact which
seems to emphasize the gap between him and his
fellow-artists, whose colouring may to a certain extent
have deviated of his own conceptions. For even in
this miniature, his own way of chosing very soft hues
and intermediate notes is quite remarkable, though this
picture is much more assimilated to the bulk of the other
illustrations than both the others.

These comparatively short notes-short, if we

consider the great amount of pictures of our manuscript and the amount of masters who have worked
on it-aim at putting forward the following points :
I. That we have here the identical book, or one
of the books made for the emperor and mentioned
by Abul Fazl-for otherwise it would be a strange
coincidence indeed that exactly the identical masters
he names are prominent in our manuscript, whilst
it seems quite natural, that they should work on the
manuscript, in which both he and his imperial
master were most interested.
2. That, in spite of the great equality of style
throughout the whole work, due perhaps partly to
the collaboration of several artists on the same picture, it still seems possible to recognize at least the
most prominent of the artistsas distinct personalities,
though not in our, the European, sense.
3. That at that period ofAkbar's reign the Indian
painters were the leading artists at his court. And
the works of these painters, though very much indebted to Persia, definitely show that they are rooted
in the old pictorial traditions of India though until
now no direct line can be drawn from the old classical
art, as we know it from Ajanta, to these relatively
modern paintings. Perhaps we may assume, that
it is a certain affinity-an innate sensefor volume and
space, a desire to representthings in a way suggesting
their reality-which made them able to assimilate
up to a certain point western influences, though these
influences do not yet play in our manuscript the
important part characteristic of them in the latest
phase of Akbar's reign.
23 V. A.
Mus., No. 8i,Akb. N. III, p. 40.

24

LEONARDO'S FANTASTIC
BY MARTIN JOHNSON, D.Sc.
fi y-

aT is now recognized that the strange

of Leonardo must be approached
not only through his few surviving
paintings and doubtful sculptures, but
also through his many hundred drawings

*xT ~genius

V. A. Mus., No. I15, Akb. N. II. p. 432.

DRAWINGS-I.

and several thousand pages of MSS. It seems likely

that the sheets now treasured at Windsor, Paris,
Milan, and elsewhere, are fairly representative, in
spite of the dispersal which began about fifty years
after his death in I519, when the descendants of

I41

OFFORTCHITORI.,VRA7PUTAXA
BY MUSKIN AND BHURA.

A-THESIEGE

C-THE

BUILDIXS

AND SARWAN.

OF AGRA. BY MUSKIN

B-THE SIEGE OF FORT CHITOR IX KAiPUfAWA. BY MUSKIN AND SARWAN.

D-THE

BUILDING OF FA THPUR SISRI.

TULSI THE ELDER AND BHAWANI.

PLATE III. AN AKBAR-NANIAHMANUSCRIPT

BY