The greatest of the Mughals, or at least the most stylish. Above, as painted by Chitarman, a Hindu artist at his court, c. 1627; below, by Rembrandt, who must have seen a print based on one of Shah Jahan's many portraits. The cultural blending is wonderful; Chitarman's portrait uses Hindu colors and a style of drawing imported from Persia, while giving the emperor a Christian halo and several onlooking putti as well. And Rembrandt is again showing how Europeans of his time were reaching out for inspiration all across the world.
And below, other pages from the Shah Jahan Album, a sort of glorious scrapbook made for the emperor, now in the Met. All of this is inspired by Jason Farago's wonderful picture essay about the Shah Jahan portrait in the New York Times.
2 comments:
"The cultural blending is wonderful; Chitarman's portrait uses Hindu colors and a style of drawing imported from Persia, while giving the emperor a Christian halo and several onlooking putti as well. And Rembrandt is again showing how Europeans of his time were reaching out for inspiration all across the world."
While Rembrandt himself came from a Christian background and may well have thought of the halos as a Christian form of iconography, it really is worth noting that halos 1) appear extensively in contexts that have absolutely nothing to do with Christianity and 2) actually predate Christianity in their usage by at least a millenia.
Which leads me to wonder if what you perceive as a cultural blending is, in fact, nothing of the sort. Is there any sort of corroborating evidence to suggest that Rembrandt was, indeed, incorporating a specifically Christian halo usage? Because the Mughals themselves used halos in their artwork extensively, which is no big surprise considering that Buddhism and Hinduism and Islam also use halos extensives. If Rembrandt is already borrowing a Mughal drawing style, Occam's Razor would suggest that his usage of a halo was done within the context of such a style, rather than somehow being imported from a specifically Christian iconology of some sort.
Addendum: I misread and confused myself.
The work is by Chitarman - not Rembrandt - who, being a Hindu, clearly would have been drawing directly from the Hindu / Persian traditions of halo iconography, rather than somehow drawing from Christian art for some unknown reason. The odds against the latter actually being the case are pretty staggering.
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