King of Arts Patrons

How big was the world in 1628? That was the year 36-year-old Prince Khurram, third son of Jahangir and a Rajput princess, became Mughal emperor of India. He assumed the exalted title Shah-Jahan, King of the World.

In terms of real estate, the world then was pretty much the same size as the world today. Yet, the most amazing revelation of the exhibition “King of the World: A Mughal Manuscript From the Royal Library, Windsor Castle,” which opened Thursday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is that the sphere of which Shah-Jahan was king cannot be measured in acres or miles. Look into the 44 sumptuous opaque watercolor paintings made to illuminate the book that chronicled the first decade of his 30-year reign, and you will see: Shah-Jahan’s world was less a place than the manifestation of an idea.

The book is called the Padshahnama, and it has been in the collection of the British royal family since 1799, when it was given to George III by a descendant of Shah-Jahan. Best known as a patron of architecture--Shah-Jahan built the magnificent mausoleum at Agra, the Taj Mahal, for his wife--he also commissioned countless works of art. Shah-Jahan, often as part of his daily routine, closely supervised a retinue of artists in the elaboration of an official style.

In the lower left of a Padshahnama illumination that records the gift of a ruby turban ornament to Prince Khurram from his father, look at the figure holding an orange drawing tablet. Payag, the artist who painted the illumination, depicts himself as an observer included among the courtiers at a great occasion; it’s a subtle but clear indication of the artist’s stature within Shah-Jahan’s household, as well as a pictorial claim of eyewitness truth for the picture.

Experts regard the Padshahnama as the greatest Mughal manuscript of all, but it has never before been shown to the public in its entirety. In 1992, the bound volume was disassembled so that conservation measures could be undertaken. Before putting the book back together, the Royal Library at Windsor Castle agreed to send the individual sheets on tour, making this a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to examine an amazing book.

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As a manuscript, it’s rather unusual. Mughals--Muslims who came to India by way of Persia--cultivated the established Persian reverence for books, conceived as vehicles of knowledge and displays of power. But the Padshahnama, which is an illustrated history, was not penned by a calligrapher and then illuminated by a painter. Instead, 14 different artists have been identified as contributors to the book, and several others remain unknown.

In the introduction to the show’s beautiful and exemplary catalog, organizer Milo Cleveland Beach, director of the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution, shows that not all the images relate directly to the text. It turns out the text was written with empty spaces reserved for pictures, but no illuminations were commissioned for the book. Instead, pictures came off the rack: They were selected from a stock of available paintings and then collaged into the manuscript.

Sometimes the picture doesn’t quite fit the story. An image of the departure of Prince Khurram from the court for an important military campaign is, for example, actually a picture of his return from battle. Another version of the same image even turns up later in the book, accompanying a different historical episode.

Beach and other scholars of Mughal painting are partly able to determine these peculiarities because of the extraordinary documentary skills of the artists. Of the scores of courtiers in individual images, many are in fact exquisite portraits of identifiable nobles. Sometimes it’s even possible to determine the date of a painting by the age of certain sitters, and to figure out a chronology for the paintings by watching certain regal figures grow progressively older.

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All but one of the illuminations have a vertical orientation, and 10 are two-page spreads. They’re a reasonably good size--perhaps a foot on the largest side--and each is literally jammed with unbelievably detailed displays of pomp, circumstance and mind-boggling minutiae. (Magnifying glasses are helpfully provided at the gallery entrance; you’ll need one.) In one elegantly grisly scene celebrating imperial retribution against a traitor, you can even make out the tiny flies buzzing about the severed heads of slaughtered cohorts.

In fact, “The death of Khan Jahan Lodi,” as the bloody scene is titled, is among the most eccentrically inventive images in the book. Nearly half the Padshahnama illuminations depict official audiences or state occasions, and those compositions are marked by a certain hieratic sameness: The page is divided into horizontal registers, with the Shah on a balcony or throne near the top, important dignitaries or subsidiary events shown in the center and lesser nobles and incidental episodes at the bottom. Visually, you read the scenes from right to left, top to bottom, as you would the manuscript’s calligraphy.

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Everything about these official pageants is plainly programmed. Painted in excruciating detail using jewel-like colors with lots of gold, these carefully ordered court scenes demonstrate a world of strict regimentation cloaked in the regalia of ostentatious power. “The death of Khan Jahan Lodi” does, too, but in a dazzlingly unique way.

Across the top, a gently arched row of 20 mounted warriors in the distance watches the foreground action from behind a rocky hill, acting as silent witnesses. Near the center of the page, echoing the arch above, a circular, almost medallion-like composition of armored warriors and horses frames a cluster of severed heads.

The lower arc of the circle is composed from the main event: Knife-wielding imperial soldiers blithely slice through the neck of poor Khan Jahan Lodi. Finally, at the bottom, more soldiers parade more severed heads.

Despite the violent gore, not one of the 37 men in the picture grimaces, shouts or even winces. Each is a veritable picture of serenity and grace--including Kahn Jahan Lodi, whose face beams with beatific radiance as his head is being ignominiously separated from his body!

And why not? As presented by the amazingly gifted artist Abid, the painting shows wickedness being destroyed by the unstoppable forces of Shah-Jahan. Even when vicious brutality ensues, all is right with the world.

Whatever the subject, each of the paintings in the Padshahnama is a picture that tells of Shah-Jahan’s unlimited power, incomparable wealth and ultimate authority. Nothing can even be conceived as existing outside its clockwork rhythms, and he holds the key. That, and not some temporal patch of mundane landscape, is what makes him King of the World.

Shah-Jahan was a control freak for the ages. He knew full well that the world was much larger than the sizable chunk of modern-day India under his strict control. (Look at the frieze of paintings behind the throne in the presentation scene about the ruby turban ornament, and you’ll spot pictures of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Muslims are forbidden to make images of Allah, but picturing divinities from the other side of the globe was not a problem--certainly not for the King of the World.) The operative words here are “under his control.” For power established the final longitude and latitude of Shah-Jahan’s world, and the magnificent Padshahnama faithfully pictured it.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through May 17. Closed Wednesdays.