III. Deccani Seals and Scribal Notations: Sources for the Study of Indo-Persian Book Arts and Collecting (c. 1400–1680)

Abstract

Fantasy-were probably struck by the technical sophistication, enigma, and seemingly "one of a kind" status of many of the artworks on view. 1 In terms of single-page paintings, arguably one of the Deccan's most famous artistic products, most of the examples in the show were framed on the wall as individual objects and presented through the eye of Mark Zebrowski, whose Deccani Painting established the foundation for the field. 2 Encountering hundreds of paintings ruptured from their original context in a bound album and bearing little or no evidence of production, such as a date or signature, Zebrowski pursued a formal approach based in exhaustive connoisseurship. The result was the grouping of paintings according to the hands of anonymous artists: for example, the "The Bodleian Painter," so-called after his masterpiece in Oxford's Bodleian Library depicting a Bijapuri hilltop shrine (dargah). 3 The Metropolitan exhibition also included a number of manuscripts, and in some cases, basic details of production were likewise ambiguous. In the case of a lavishly illuminated, mid-sixteenth century Qurʾan manuscript now in Kuwait, for example, the calligrapher ʿAbd al-Qadir al-Husayni is known from his signature in the concluding falnama (lit., book of divination, here in reference to an illuminated finispiece), but where exactly the potentially peripatetic scribe copied the manuscript-Iran or India, Shiraz or Golconda-remains debatable. 4 The above enigmas surrounding production, combined with bold color combinations, lyrical landscapes, and perplexing shifts in scale, is largely responsible for III. Deccani Seals and Scribal Notations sources for the study of indo-persian book arts and collecting (c. 1400-1680) keelan overton and jake benson