The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Mughal court painters · the Book of Hamza, the illustrated romance of Amir Hamza, made for the emperor Akbar by the painters of his new imperial workshop · opaque watercolour with gold on cotton cloth, the cloth backed with paper · large single sheets, the picture filling the sheet · directed by Mir Sayyid Ali and then Abd al-Samad · about 1562 to 1577 · dispersed: the largest group in Vienna, a substantial group in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, single folios and small groups elsewhere · the unit scored is the surviving folios, taken as one work, a series scored as a series; the lost majority is charged under The Imperishable only
Mode
Illustrated romance made public: the book picture enlarged to a sheet of cloth and shown to listeners while the tale was told
Mythos
The hero cycle of quest and combat, with the giant, the demon, the sorcerer, the trickster companion and the besieged city as acting figures
Phase
About fifteen years of a workshop, about 1562 to 1577; the early folios nearer the Persian page, the late ones holding volumetric figures and recessive space
Presentation
Large single sheets of opaque watercolour and gold on cotton cloth backed with paper, the Persian text for each episode written apart from the picture
Register
Tumult and wonder: saturated reds, greens and blues, gold on textiles and architecture, the field filled edge to edge
Scale
A cycle once of many hundreds of paintings in many volumes, now a dispersed remnant of a seventh or less
Governing Proposition
A new emperor set the first great commission of his workshop to a popular romance: the adventures of Amir Hamza, a champion of the faith who travels, fights giants and demons, is captured and escapes, again and again. Two Persian masters directed a large workshop of Persian and Indian painters for about fifteen years, and the pictures were made large, on cloth, to be held up before a gathering while the story was told. The wager of the cycle is that a book can become a public image, and that a style which none of its makers had when the work began can be made in the making of it: Persian surfaces of pattern and Indian weight, recession and observed life on one sheet, at the extreme moment of every episode.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The support of the image is cloth. Each folio of the Hamzanama is a large single sheet of cotton, backed with paper, painted in opaque watercolour with gold, and the picture fills the sheet. As the arrangement is usually described, the Persian text for the episode was written apart from the picture, on the reverse or on an accompanying panel, so that the painting could be held up before a gathering while the text was read or the tale told; how it was arranged on every folio cannot now be checked. What is plain from the sheets themselves is their purpose. They were made to be shown, at a distance, to many people at once.
That purpose governs everything on them. A book picture is held in the hand by one reader and can reward him with small things. These pictures had to be read across a room. So the compositions are bold and crowded and legible at a glance; the colour is strong, saturated reds, greens and blues with gold on the textiles and the buildings; and of every episode the painters chose the extreme moment, the blow, the fall, the monster at its height. Bound as a small book for a single reader, the same episodes would have to become another kind of painting.
The work scored here is the surviving folios, about 1562 to 1577, taken as one work: a series scored as a series, the cycle as it now stands in its paintings. The tale of Amir Hamza as a told and written romance, the Persian text panels and the later manuscripts the workshop went on to make are its context. What is weighed most is four kinds of folio: the battles and sieges, where the workshop’s tumult is fullest; the giants, demons and sorcery, where its invention is freest; the town and the household, where the observation of Hindustan breaks into the Persian scheme; and the late folios, where volumetric figures and recessive space are most developed.
Movement II
The patron was Akbar, who reigned from 1556 to 1605, and the Hamzanama is the first great commission of his workshop. It was directed by two Persian masters who had come to India with the court of Humayun: Mir Sayyid Ali, and after him Abd al-Samad. They had been trained in the manuscript painting of the Safavid court, whose pictures are small images within the page of a book, text above and below, flat planes, jewel-like colour, figures elegant and still. The Seduction of Yusuf (Behzad, 8.5) and The Court of Gayumars (Sultan Muhammad, 8.8) stand on this desk for that tradition.
Under them worked a large workshop of painters, Persian and Indian, many recruited for the project, over about fifteen years. What came out of it was a style that did not exist when the work began. The picture grew to the size of a sheet of cloth and the text retreated behind it. Figures gained weight and movement; space began to recede; bodies collided; colour was used for force and not only for ornament. Indian painting traditions and the observation of Indian life entered the Persian frame. No one of the makers had this style at the start, and the cycle is the record of its being made.
Against the two Persian folios it departs from, the cycle loses on the axes of finish and wins on the axes of consequence. Each of those is a single perfected sheet by one master, whole, and they stand above it on The Made, The Inner Law and The Imperishable. The Hamzanama is a workshop cycle of uneven hands, largely lost, and it stands above them on The Swerve and on Pressure on Tradition. Akbar’s other great project of the same years, Fatehpur Sikri (8.3), has the same profile: a synthesis founded by one court, credited for its departure and its reach, charged for joins left unresolved.
Movement III
The romance is a hero cycle. Its champion of the faith travels, fights giants and demons, rescues, is captured and escapes, and does so again and again. Every folio is a station of that quest, so its structure is load-bearing throughout, and its figures act: the giant, the demon or div, the sorcerer, the trickster companion, the besieged city. They are not allusions in the margin of another subject. They are the subject, set among Indian walls and Indian trees, in Mughal dress, with specific weapons in specific interiors.
The giants and demons are painted larger than the men who fight them, with real bulk and menace, and one may fill a quarter of the sheet. Rocks rear and twist in the Persian manner, but are pushed toward weight and mass. In the battles the field fills from edge to edge with bodies, horses and weapons, and the workshop masses its figures without losing the action of each. In a siege the wall, the attackers and the defenders make one diagonal of force. Heads are struck off and bodies thrown from walls, shown with zest and without pity: the court’s own idea of heroic rule.
The height is frequent, because the extreme moment was always chosen, and it is of one register: tumult, terror, wonder, seldom stilled into the grave or the tender. The crowding that drives the excitement also flattens the summits, since a moment of awe must compete with everything else on the sheet, and secondary figures, tiles and onlookers are often fill. The myth itself was given, a popular romance of long standing; the painters carry it at the level of incident and do not remake it, and the hero remains a type who does not deepen across the surviving folios.
Movement IV
Beside the giants stands Hindustan. Masons and carpenters at work, a gardener, women at a well or a bath, a bazaar, the plants and animals of the country: these are observed with a directness the Persian page had not given them. The hero’s fantastic adventure happens in a real, laboured, populated place, and that is the clearest meaning the cycle holds. Few cycles of images hold so many orders of reality: war and the state, the sacred, the supernatural, labour and the city, the natural order, the family and the erotic in captive princesses, marriages and households. What is almost absent is the inner life.
The best folios show great command. Textiles and tilework are rendered with a jeweller’s precision; architecture is drawn in recession, with balconies, screens and courtyards; trees are observed leaf by leaf; animals have weight and life; gold models and glitters. The scale required a new technique of large painting on cloth. The quality is uneven, as the work of many hands over fifteen years makes it: some folios are crowded past legibility, some figures summary, some spatial systems awkwardly joined.
The joins are where the cycle is most divided. One law holds it, the episode at its peak shown to a gathering, and that law runs from the first folios to the last. But two pictorial physics live side by side, sometimes on one sheet: the planar Persian page of tilework and rocks laid as a carpet, and the late folio’s recessive street with solid, shaded figures. A solid figure stands on a ground tilted up as pattern; a building opening in depth gives onto a flat sky of ornament. The synthesis is credited for being made, and charged where the made whole does not obey one law.
Movement V
The cycle as made is mostly gone. The figure usually reported from Mughal sources is about 1,400 paintings in fourteen volumes; it is reported, and cannot be checked here. Of what was made, a seventh or less is known today, and the counts vary. The folios were dispersed from the Mughal library and were out of view for long periods; attention to them as a group dates only from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The largest group is in Vienna, many of its sheets cut down; a substantial group is in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; single folios and small groups are scattered through other collections of Europe and America. Many survivors are trimmed, abraded, stained or faded.
The sequence of the volumes cannot be reassembled, and the narrative form is legible only in fragments. Yet each surviving folio is legible as an image, and the style and the nature of the project are fully knowable from them. That the cycle still reads as itself after so great a loss says two things at once: that its form survives in each of its parts, and that its parts were never required by one another. The Ajanta Caves (8.4) and The Bayeux Tapestry (8.4) are the nearest painted and narrative cycles on this desk; The Book of Kells (8.9), one object whole at the summit of its making, leads it almost throughout.
The reach went through the workshop more than through the folios. The painters trained on the Hamzanama went on to the great illustrated histories and epics of Akbar’s reign; through them the line runs to the painting of Jahangir and Shah Jahan and into the sub-imperial, Rajput and Pahari courts that took up Mughal manners. That reach is regional, confined in its era to the courts of South Asia. The questions it has raised for a century of scholars remain open: who painted which folio, how the style changed and how the folios can be ordered by it, what the images say of Akbar’s court, its faith and its kingship. A folio returned to yields more incident. The founding is the cycle’s claim, and it holds.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test has to be put twice, to the folio and to the cycle, and the answers differ. Within the strongest folios much resists removal: in a siege the wall, the attackers and the defenders are one diagonal of force, and the giant who fills a quarter of the sheet is the episode. But the folios are crowded by principle, and secondary figures, tiles, trees and onlookers are often fill. At the level of the cycle the case is weaker. The romance is episodic, one adventure after another, and its scale was permitted by an emperor’s appetite rather than compelled by an argument. That the surviving cycle still reads as itself after losing most of its parts shows the parts were not required by one another.
Score: 7.5 / 10
What is disclosed can be stated, but it is disclosed mainly as a world rather than as a condition. The folios open the world of Hindustan into an imported Persian scheme: masons and carpenters at work, a gardener, women at a well or a bath, a bazaar, the plants and animals of the country, observed with a directness the Persian page had not given them. That the hero’s fantastic adventure happens in a real, laboured, populated place is a meaning, and it holds. So is the court’s idea of heroic rule: heads struck off, bodies thrown from walls, a champion who conquers by force, shown with zest and without pity. But most of what the cycle gives is spectacle, energy and wonder, and that is mood.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Elevation recurs, of the kinds the axis admits: terror, grandeur and wonder. The giants and demons stand larger than the men who fight them, painted with real bulk and menace; a monster coils against the hero; rocks rear and twist in the Persian manner but are pushed toward weight and mass; battles fill the field edge to edge with bodies, horses and weapons; night scenes and sorcerers’ marvels follow. The height is frequent across the survivors, because the workshop chose the extreme moment of each episode, and colour carries much of it. Held below the high eights because the elevation is of one tumultuous register, seldom stilled into the grave or the tender, and because the crowding that drives it also flattens the summits.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The archetype is built, not evoked: the whole cycle is a hero cycle, a champion of the faith who travels, fights giants and demons, rescues, is captured and escapes, again and again. Quest and combat are load-bearing in every folio, since every folio is a station of them. The giant, the demon or div, the sorcerer, the trickster companion and the besieged city are present as acting figures, not as allusion. And the particulars stay particular: Indian walls, Indian trees, Mughal dress, specific weapons and interiors. What holds the figure is that the myth was given, a popular romance of long standing, carried at the level of incident and not reorganised into a new archetypal meaning; the hero is a type and does not deepen.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the manuscript painting of the Safavid court, in which both directors were trained: small images within the page of a book, text above and below, flat planes, jewel-like colour, figures elegant and still. The departure is wide and on several fronts at once. The picture is enlarged to a sheet of cloth and made to be shown, not held, so that the image dominates and the text retreats. Figures gain weight and movement; space recedes; bodies collide; colour is used for force. Indian painting and Indian life enter a Persian frame, carried by a mixed workshop. The stake was a new emperor’s first great project and fifteen years of labour. Held below 9.0 because the departure was assembled gradually and collectively.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Change the form and much of what the work knows goes. The cycle was made as large pictures shown to listeners while the story was told: the image is public, held at a distance, meant to be read across a room by a gathering. That is why the compositions are bold, crowded and legible at a glance, why the extreme moment is chosen, why colour is strong. Bound as a small book for a single reader, the same episodes would have to become another kind of painting. The cloth and the scale belong to that purpose, and one sheet holding a whole incident is what lets Persian pattern and Indian volume share it. Held below the high eights because the order of episodes is the romance’s, not the painters’.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Evidence over promise: about a century of scholarship on the folios as a group, which has kept finding questions. Who painted which folio, and how a workshop of many hands divided its labour; how the style changed over fifteen years and how the folios can be ordered by it; what the images say about Akbar’s court, its faith and its idea of kingship; how Persian, Indian and, later, European pictorial habits met in it. These questions remain open and productive. But the return has been largely specialist, the work of historians of Mughal painting, and the folios have not drawn the wide and various rereading the elder works on this desk carry. A folio returned to yields more incident and more detail; it seldom yields a new meaning.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is painting in India in the 1560s and 1570s, and the Mughal court’s in particular. The intrinsic force is a founding: the cycle is the project in which Mughal painting was made out of Persian training, Indian painters and Indian subjects, in a workshop the emperor built in order to make it, a real reorganisation of what was possible in its field. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the workshop trained on the Hamzanama went on to the great illustrated histories and epics of Akbar’s reign, and through them the line runs to the painting of Jahangir and Shah Jahan and into the sub-imperial, Rajput and Pahari courts. Held below 9.0 because the reach is regional, and went through the workshop more than through the dispersed, little-seen folios.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about four and a half centuries. Form: the cycle is mostly lost. A seventh or less of the paintings is known, the sequence of the volumes cannot be reassembled, and the narrative is legible only in fragments; each surviving folio is legible as an image, and the style and the project’s nature are fully knowable from them, which is why the charge is not heavier. Presence: dispersed from the Mughal library, out of view for long periods, recovered as a group only from the late nineteenth century, and now scattered across many collections, seldom seen together. Fabric: cloth and pigment worn, trimmed, stained and faded on many survivors. The loss goes past heavy repair, to the greater part of the work.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged as command of opaque watercolour and gold on cloth at large scale. The best folios show great command: textiles and tilework rendered with a jeweller’s precision; architecture drawn in recession with balconies, screens and courtyards; trees observed leaf by leaf; animals with weight and life; figures massed in battle without losing their individual action; gold used to model and to glitter. The making is load-bearing, since the force of each episode is carried by draughtsmanship and colour, and the scale required a new technique of large painting on cloth. Charged: the quality is uneven, as a workshop of many hands over fifteen years makes it; some folios are crowded past legibility, some figures summary, some spatial systems awkwardly joined.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: a flat, patterned Persian page of tilework and rocks laid as a carpet, and a late folio’s recessive street with solid, shaded figures in Indian dress. Do they obey one law? In part. The law that holds the cycle is the episode at its peak, shown to a gathering: everything on the sheet serves the moment of action and is made legible at a distance, and that law runs from the first folios to the last. But two pictorial physics coexist, sometimes on one sheet, the planar and the volumetric, and their meeting is often unresolved: a solid figure stands on a ground tilted up as pattern, a recessive building opens onto a flat sky of ornament. The range, domestic to demonic, is credited; the joins are charged.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The orders held are many: war and the state, in battles, sieges and courts; the sacred, in a romance whose hero fights for the faith against unbelievers and sorcerers; the supernatural, in giants, demons and magic; labour and the city, in builders, craftsmen, the bazaar and the household; the natural order, in trees, rivers, rocks and animals; the family and the erotic, in captive princesses, marriages and households. Few cycles of images hold so much. They are integrated by the romance’s frame, every order appearing as the setting or the obstacle of the hero’s adventure. What holds the axis is that the integration is by sequence rather than by structure, one order after another across the episodes, and that consciousness, the inner life, is almost absent.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.8, with The Made at 8.5. The founding act of Mughal painting: a Persian manner of small book pictures turned, over fifteen years, into large public images of weight, movement and recession by a mixed workshop, with a reach through that workshop into the Mughal, Rajput and Pahari painting that followed, and a command of colour, gold and massed figures at a scale that required a new technique.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.5, The Unconcealment at 7.6, and The Bottomless Well and The Inner Law at 7.8. An episodic romance whose parts are not required by one another; a world disclosed more than a condition, with spectacle and wonder as its main gift; a return that has been largely specialist; and two pictorial physics, the planar and the volumetric, meeting unresolved on the same sheets. They are one fact: a workshop cycle carrying a given romance, made by many hands as a style was being found.
The Necessity Cap is met at its line: The Inevitable at 7.5 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.4, The Made at 8.5, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: Pressure on Tradition at 8.9 and The Swerve at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Imperishable at 8.4 falls short by a tenth, The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 by half a point and The Unconcealment at 7.6 by nine tenths. The Universal Minimum is met at its line (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.5, against 7.5; The Inevitable stands on it), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 97.9, an average of 8.16 that displays 8.2, in Tier IV; the Epochal Gate, failed on three of its five axes, and the aggregate hold the cycle there.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the surviving folios as published and exhibited, well on the project as a whole, its scale, its format, its directors and its place in Mughal painting, less well on individual folios, whose subjects are named here in general terms. No folio was examined in person. The work scored is the surviving folios, about 1562 to 1577, taken as one work, a series scored as a series: the cycle as it now stands in its paintings, with the lost majority charged under The Imperishable only. Not in the unit, and neither scored nor credited: the tale of Amir Hamza as a told and written romance, the Persian text panels, and the later manuscripts of Akbar’s reign that the workshop went on to make. The figure of about 1,400 paintings in fourteen volumes is given as reported, not verified. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the dimensions of the sheets, the exact number of surviving folios and how many are in each collection, the names of the other collections that hold them, the dates and occasions of their publication and exhibition, how text and picture were arranged on each folio, and the attribution of any folio to a named painter. No words are quoted.