Details
AN ILLUMINATED SHAMSA
MUGHAL INDIA, CIRCA 1620
Opaque pigments heightened with gold on paper, with elaborate polychrome illumination encircling a gold roundel, illuminated pendants above and below and spandrels to corners, all within knotted rope border, laid down on card, reverse plain, mounted, framed and glazed
Panel 10 ¾ x 6 5/8in. (27.3 x 16.6cm.); folio 11 7⁄8 x 7 ¾in. (30.2 x 19.5cm.)
Provenance
American art market, 1991

Présenté par

Sara Plumbly
Sara Plumbly Director, Head of Department

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Descriptif du lot

Shamsas of the Mughals were important in the royal aesthetics as adorned images of the sun, attached to the palace wall and illuminated in the evenings, described by Emperor Akbar’s (r. 1556-1605) court chronicler, Abu-l-Fazl, as “a divine light, which God directly transfers to kings,” and “an image of the Divine glory” (H. Blochmann, Ain-i Akbari, Calcutta, 1939, vol.I, p.50).

While the colouring of the illumination of later Mughal examples is warmer, earlier classic designs inspired by the Timurids retain cooler, striking golds and blues (Stuart Cary Welch, India: Art and Culture 1300-1900, New York, 1985, p.236; on the style, see Thomas W. Lentz and Glenn D. Lowry, Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century, 1989, pp. 189-207). An early prototype is the shamsa of the 1430-1 Diwan of Amir Khusraw Dihlavi copied for Ibrahim Sultan in Shiraz (Türk ve İslam Eserleri Müzesi, 1982).

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