Mughal and Persian Mountain Landscapes
The courtly gaze on Kashmir and the mountains Overview Imagine a painting the size of a large book page – perhaps thirty centimetres tall by twenty wide – on a sheet of paper so finely prepared that its surface feels almost like polished marble. The paper has been burnished with an agate stone until it is perfectly smooth, then tinted with a wash of cream or pale buff. Around the painting, a wide margin has been decorated with an intricate pattern of flowers – iris, poppy, narcissus, lily – painted in gold so fine that you must hold the page at an angle to catch the light before the blossoms emerge from the cream ground like ghosts. Within the ruled border, the image itself is dense with detail: dozens of figures, each no larger than your thumbnail, rendered with a brush so fine that individual eyelashes are visible. The colours are rich, layered, and luminous – a warm saffron-gold sky, cool grey-green rocky hillsides, brilliant ultramarine water, deep vermilion pavilion awnings, touches of burnished gold that catch the light differently from the surrounding pigment. There is a quality of precision to the surface that is almost jewel-like: every leaf, every pebble, every fold of fabric has been observed and recorded with a patience that borders on the devotional. ...