Aesthetic Hybridity in Mughal Painting, 1526-1658

Valerie Gonzalez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138564879
• eBook ISBN: 9781317184867
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art General

The first specialized critical-aesthetic study to be published on the concept of hybridity in early Mughal painting, this book investigates the workings of the diverse creative forces that led to the formation of a unique Mughal pictorial language. Mughal pictoriality distinguishes itself from the Persianate models through the rationalization of the picture's conceptual structure and other visual modes of expression involving the aesthetic concept of mimesis. If the stylistic and iconographic results of this transformational process have been well identified and evidenced, their hermeneutic interpretation greatly suffers from the neglect of a methodologically updated investigation of the images' conceptual underpinning. Valerie Gonzalez addresses this lacuna by exploring the operations of cross-fertilization at the level of imagistic conceptualization resulting from the multifaceted encounter between the local legacy of Indo-Persianate book art, the freshly imported Persian models to Mughal India after 1555 and the influx of European art at the Mughal court in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The author's close examination of the visuality, metaphysical order and aesthetic language of Mughal imagery and portraiture sheds new light on this particular aspect of its aesthetic hybridity, which is usually approached monolithically as a historical phenomenon of cross-cultural interaction. That approach fails to consider specific parameters and features inherent to the artistic practice, such as the differences between doxis and praxis, conceptualization and realization, intentionality and what lies beyond it. By studying the distinct phases and principles of hybridization between the variegated pictorial sources at work in the Mughal creative process at the successive levels of the project/intention, the practice/realization and the result/product, the author deciphers the modalities of appropriation and manipulation of the heterogeneous elements. Her unique

PART I
Studying Mughal Painting: Critical Issues and State of Affairs

1

Epistemological Preliminaries

Too often do reviewers remind us of the mob of Astrologers, Chaldeans, and Soothsayers gathered before the “writing on the wall” [Daniel, 5:7], and unable to read the characters or make known the interpretation.

Currer Bell (aka Charlotte Brontë)

The academic literature on Mughal painting is undeniably rich.¹ The dissemination of the collections throughout the world has facilitated their study by scholars, curators, and connoisseurs from Asia, Europe, and America, and all have significantly contributed to our historical knowledge of this fascinating material. However, the use of the expression “historical knowledge” instead of just “knowledge” is intentional. It is meant to underscore an asymmetry that characterizes the findings on not only Mughal painting but also, more broadly, Islamic pictorial art. This asymmetry is seen in the epistemological difference between evidencing and understanding, between historical-cultural information, descriptive accounts, and understanding the nature of the art itself.² While the historiography on painting from the Islamic world provides plenty of information about its history, archaeology, iconographic, and stylistic components, it seldom deals with the aesthetic hermeneutic of the images.³ The creative principles of the pictorial practice, the working of the plastic forms, their semantic properties and ontology, their “becoming” and “lives” in the Deleuzian sense, have not been adequately probed.⁴ In short, painting as a cultural signifier in the Islamic world has received much attention with remarkable results, but as art it remains less well understood. This state of affairs compels one to ponder several epistemological problems, setting aside the need to redefine and clarify visual concepts and tropes too loosely or inaccurately used in studies on Islamic art.

The Question of Art History versus Art Criticism

Although far from being a new object of debate, the question of art history versus art criticism has decisive significance here because of this book’s distinctive approach in relation to the sheer number of publications on Persianate painting in general. My view of this question, however, posits it in terms of “traditional art history” versus “new interdisciplinary art history,” which I associate with art criticism or aesthetics applied to the probing of artworks produced in Islam. We may add to this description that one approach focuses on art productivity while the other focuses on the art products themselves. Nonetheless, following this epistemic divide the great majority of studies belong to the category of art history, while our study falls within that of art criticism and aesthetics.

The designation “art criticism,” however, requires further clarification. An important point to make is that in this book, and in my research in general, it does not involve evaluating the quality of the objects, as is the case for the analysis of contemporary art. On the other hand, art criticism of Persianate painting involves the examination of a work as an aesthetic entity. But what exactly is an “aesthetic entity”?⁵

Artworks are aesthetic entities insofar as their ontological definition rests upon their visual forms’ perceptual properties deliberately produced or created to generate sensory cognitions through which the beholder engages in psychic and intellectual experience. Although the generic quality of being “aesthetic” is often casually conflated with the specificity of being “beautiful,” the artwork’s aesthetic qualities do not necessarily include beauty nor does the experience of this artwork necessarily trigger the feeling or sensation of the beautiful. In art history writing, it is up to the argument’s context and wording to indicate whether the adjective “aesthetic” means beautiful or refers to the object’s capital of beauty. This book does not authorize the casual amalgam of meaning between “aesthetic” and “beautiful.” Finally, there is the ontological difference between visual and nonvisual aesthetics that sometimes echo each other, as we will have the opportunity to observe. The art theorist Jean Fisher remarked, “visual art remains a materially based process, functioning on the level of affect, not purely semiotics—i.e. a synaesthetic relation is established between work and viewer which is in excess of visuality.”⁶

The knowledge gathered from all the enquiries that target processes and facts surrounding but not centered on this aesthetic foundation of the artwork constitute an episteme that I designate with the all-embracing expression “the archaeology of art.” But straightaway these terms “espisteme” and “archaeology” require a preliminary explanation.

The meaning of these terms as I use them does not allude to Michel Foucault’s approach to the same notions in his history of thought, although by nature such an argument does necessarily evoke his founding contribution to epistemology. Here “episteme” refers to the regular, generic Greek technical locution that signifies a category of knowledge or science commonly used in any discussion of epistemology. It does not convey the specific intimations and conceptualizations the French thinker has put into it. Similarly, I do not intend to bring Foucault’s interpretation of the concept of archaeology into my definition of it, as it does not relate to his meta-humanistic ideas operating beneath the level of individual consciousness, in the collective unconscious. In fact, there are many “archaeologies” depending on the critical framework in which they operate, including within Foucault’s multifaceted epistemology itself where one may deal with the overarching “archaeology of knowledge,” “the archaeology of human sciences” or the more specific “archaeology of the medical gaze.”⁷ My propos is very pragmatic and limits itself to the technicalities of art history practice, well short of the philosophical scope of Foucault’s decoding of patterns of primordial thinking beyond individual will. We may say that the connection between Foucault’s discourse on epistemology and archaeology and my own contouring of the tropes is rather superficial.

Thus, by the locution “archaeology of art,” I mean to include the original meaning that traditional art history gave to it in surveys of ancient arts as well as its reference to site investigation fieldwork. But I also refine and expand this definition to better distinguish these established practices from the newest interdisciplinary ones. In this book, “the archaeology of art” constitutes a multidisciplinary category that integrates historical and cultural contextualization of the material under observation, the anthropology and sociology of art, museology, codicology and conservation studies. The “archaeology of art” is thus to be understood as historical-sociological knowledge about art as distinct from aesthetic-critical knowledge of art.

By inference, the findings brought about by the aesthetic-critical enquiry compose another distinct episteme that specifically concerns questions of plastic conceptualization, image construction, visual cognitivity, processes of semiotization and semantization of the forms, and aesthetic ontology and phenomenology.⁸ About the phenomenological method in particular, Edmund Husserl explains that it interrogates “the constitution of objects of all sorts within cognition,” and deals with issues of “cognitions as appearances, presentations, acts of consciousness in which this or that object is presented, is an object of consciousness, passively or actively,” or “the constitution of the object of experience.”⁹ In sum, the critical episteme consists of the knowledge about what I concisely call “the aesthetic physics and metaphysics of the artwork.” A short theoretical exposé is again necessary.

Any art form, and a fortiori any image or painting, is a metaphysical mirror. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty wrote, “Any theory of painting is a metaphysics.”¹⁰ This statement can be further extended with the corollary claim that any painting or image constitutes a represented metaphysics, that is, a physical perceptual representation of metaphysics in the aesthetic domain. Otherwise termed, a metaphysics represented in art and aesthetics results from the process of expressing, representing, and communicating by perceptual means or material forms a particular mode of world-apprehension. In painting, this metaphysics of aesthetic order is represented in the image’s aesthetic physics comprising the constitutive elements of the imagistic construct. The physics of the painted representation is to be distinguished from the physics of its medium, book, album, folio, canvas, fabric, and so on. By way of consequence, what we usually consider as the aesthetic ontology of painting or art corresponds to the nature of this compound of the object’s aesthetic physics and metaphysics. But that is not all.

Owing to the ontological duality in art of form and content or expression and subject matter or aesthetic means and ends, the object’s metaphysics is, in principle, binary. It has two distinct levels corresponding to the metaphysics of the representer, image or painting, and the metaphysics of the representation understood as the narrative or iconographic discourse this image or painting conveys. In other words, this second metaphysical level resides in the painting’s semantics and discourse, and corresponds to the conception of the world its iconography delivers, while the primary metaphysical level resides in the painting’s plastic structure and corresponds to the conception of the world its forms and visual concepts reflect or design. That in some instances the two metaphysical levels of the artwork appear conflated into a unique and single construct is a matter of strategy and manipulation, as observed for example in some branches of Abstract and Minimalist art characterized by the intentional elimination of any content outside or separate from the form which then is the content itself.¹¹ This, however, by no means concerns Persianate painting for which this conceptual divide remains fully operative and relevant.

Finally, one crucial point must be retained from this theoretical explanation. Based on this binary scheme of the art’s plasticity and discourse, our designation “metaphysics of the image, picture, or painting” precisely designates the mode of world-apprehension reflected in the forms or in the pictorial-aesthetic language, not the mode of world apprehension communicated through the represented narrative, the representation’s content or iconographic semantics.

How to Practice Art Criticism? A Matter of Choice

The spectrum of disciplines the designation “art criticism” covers is, so to speak, unlimited and unfixed. Any analytical technique that allows the elucidation of problems related to art’s becoming and being, and of what the artworks says and how it says it, acquires immediate legitimacy. In this sense I equate art criticism with the concept of art hermeneutic and allow myself to talk about “visual exegesis.” Objections have been made about the adequacy of the tools and lexicon of textual analysis and literary criticism for the study of material objects based on the ontological difference between texts and things.¹² My stance on this issue consists in putting aside the controversy and apprehending the concept of hermeneutic as an interpretive activity that epistemologically posits both visual and written material as a broad field of thought and expression.¹³ Seen from this perspective, hermeneutic better emphasizes the centrality of the artifact as an object of cognitivity in art historical research. However, to avoid any possible confusion, and contrary to what opponents of art criticism and aesthetics applied to Islamic art usually say to justify their position, contextualization, as distinct from the hermeneutic practice of reading the object, constitutes an essential parameter of study. The established methods of contextualization partake of the pluridisciplinary panoply of the critic of Islamic art who is no different than, say, the French paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin, who declared that nothing is intelligible outside of history.¹⁴

Furthermore, art criticism shares with archaeology of art some basic analytical methods, such as formal and iconographic analysis and socio-historical investigation. However, art criticism departs from archaeology of art as the former freely crosses or removes the boundaries between disciplines, eras, regions, and other traditional categories petrifying the artwork in its status of historical evidence and period cultural signifier, thus leaving in the dark entire dimensions of the artworks’ structures and meaning. Understanding the circumstances of creation does serve the hermeneutic-critical project but is neither its only o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Studying Mughal Painting: Critical Issues and State of Affairs
• Part II The Mughal Pictorial Becoming: From the Beginning of the Empire (1526) to the End of Shah Jahan’s Reign (1658)
• Conclusion
• References
• Index