The study of pre-modern albums (Pers. muraqqa') from the Islamic World is particularly suited to a panel highlighting a museum's holdings in Islamic Painting. For, akin to museums, albums themselves are collations of fragments often from larger works, forming new wholes that reflect the individual tastes of their patrons or even serve as manuals with exemplars of calligraphic or other stylistic achievements. In the latter case, they had often "set a standard" in their own times and later for excellence in some aspect of the painted medium. The San Diego Museum of Art's manuscripts and individual folios dating to the second millennium CE, including South Asia's Mughal empire (1526-1858), constitute a stellar and unparalleled collection that indeed sets a standard for collecting in our times. As such, by bringing together examples of an inherently fragmentary ethos, the SDMA collection provides scholars with a rare opportunity to analyze the enigmatic and even frustrating practice among early modern elites of collating albums. This paper will address the question of whether the emperor Akbar (r. 1555-1605) - the best known of South Asia's Mughal emperors for his serious statesmanship, ecumenical religious policies, successful military campaigns, and extensive architectural patronage - was himself a patron of albums. Relying on works in the SDMA collection, and building on the work of David J. Roxburgh, Molly Aitken and Elaine Wright (among others), the paper will propose that, yes, the Emperor did approve of albums. The paper will begin by defining (as much as possible) the album in the Mughal context, and also highlight its reception and treatment in scholarship. The paper will contribute to the current rethinking of the significance of albums in the early modern context, suggesting that a scholarly misunderstanding of the album's importance is precisely what led to the question, "Did the emperor Akbar approve of albumsa"

Drawing on the rich resources of the San Diego Museum of Art as well as on other collections, this paper discusses the iconographic development of two frequent figures in Persian and Arabic manuscripts, Solomon and Majnun, in relation to the creatures that surround them, though in very different settings. The Court of Solomon provides an ideal venue for an orderly depiction of animals and other beings, demons and jinns, in a celebration of order, degree, and decorum: a full orchestra paying homage to a divinely blessed Prophet-King. The Court of Majnun is more of an austere alfresco party, where intimacy replaces awe and subjugation without robbing the King of Love from his own particular aura of power and grandeur. In contrast to Solomon's court, with its Noah's Ark catalogue of all creatures great and small, the animals, which curl around Majnun as companions and act as chorus to his grief, vary in number, position and species from illustration to illustration. By studying the illustrations against their literary context (Qur'anic and Qisas al-anbiya' motifs and their later elaboration in verse and prose narratives in the case of Solomon; and in the work of the 12th century Persian poet Nizami and subsequent writers in the case of Majnun), in Persian and Indian manuscripts, the paper aims to show the variety of ways in which the relationship between human beings and animals were expressed and developed in different regions and periods and how the illustrations often serve as commentaries and invite the onlooker/reader to interpret the polysemous text in a certain way. The paper will conclude by pointing to some further paths of research, and the wider context of animals and birds and their changing symbolic significance in Persian art, by placing the above debate within other perspectives on Persian art, including, as well as of course the relatively well-researched Kalila and Dimna repertoire, the sometimes illustrated Conference of the Birds by the 12th century Persian mystic poet 'Attar where the birds themselves have their own court, with human beings relegated to subsidiary narratives and the mythical of Simurgh as the sought-after but allusive ideal monarch.

The Mughal empire that controlled northern India and the five sultanates that ruled the Deccan plateau of southern India during the late 16th and early 17th centuries maintained strong ties, both political and cultural, to Iran. Many of the noblemen at these courts were, in fact, recent immigrants from such places as Hamadan, Shiraz, and Astarabad. A continuous flow of immigrants brought Persian people, products and ideas to India. Over time, the local cultures that developed in these regions interwove Persian and Indic cultural practices in varied and complex ways. This paper will offer a preliminary discussion of a largely unpublished, richly illustrated manuscript of the Shahnama in the courtly style of the early 17th century sultanate of Bijapur. Although no colophon has yet come to light, it is likely that the manuscript was produced at the court of the Adil Shahi sultan, a major center of artistic production in this period. Its illustrated pages and text pages - four of which are now in the San Diego Museum of Art - are today spread among museums across the world and thus have eluded comprehensive study. Using close analysis of the illustrations and their relationship to the text, as well as comparison with illustrations from Shahnama manuscripts produced for the Mughal emperors, the paper will elucidate how the Shahnama was understood within Bijapuri society at this time. The way in which Bijapuri artists approached this quintessentially Persian text will be taken as suggestive of how they conceived of the role of Iran in their local society. Ultimately, it will be demonstrated that the reception of the Shahnama in India in this period was far from consistent. While the Mughals adopted the Shahnama as their own story and retold it in a local pictorial language, the Bijapuri manuscript conveys a more ambiguous message in which the Shahnama is both foreign and familiar, novel and classic.

This paper attempts to interpret the iconography of a seventeenth-century manuscript painting from India at the San Diego Museum of Art. It considers the iconography of "Alexander in a chinar tree, greets two sages and their retainers" from an Iskandarnama manuscript, dated circa 1610, by deciphering the symbolic significance of the various figures depicted. The function of such figures as the herder and his cattle in the upper section of the painting, or the plane tree with its multi-colored leaves, and the smaller blossoming tree in its lower half, and other details, are traced back to the germination of such iconographic configurations more than a century earlier at the workshops of the last Timurid ruler in Herat. It was then that Persianate manuscript illustrations began to include figure-types that seem to have little or no connection to the narrative of the accompanying text. Such extra-textual depictions disturb the transparency and cohesiveness of the composition and have never been satisfactorily accounted for, although they abound in post-fifteenth century paintings from Iran, Central Asia, and Mughal India. The figures in the "Alexander in a chinar tree" are traced back to their iconographic and symbolic origins, when the intertextual discourse of Sufism--and above all its metaphors for remembrance of and ultimate union with the Divine-- already popularized by the Persian and Indo-Muslim poets, finally penetrated the art of figural manuscript painting. Through textual analysis of Sufi works--or works whose narrative could be read allegorically as such--together with the iconography of a number of key manuscript paintings that illustrate passages from these works, the paper will demonstrate that even as the illustration of the allegorical narrative forms a normative relation with the literal meaning of the accompanying passage of Iskandarnama--which serves as the textual vehicle--the referents for the other heretofore enigmatic figures within the painting can be traced back to the dominant Sufi discourse of Persianate culture in the fifteenth century. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, many such figure-types retained at least some traces of their original symbolic mystical significance, while others became associated with altogether new referents or were reduced to mere ornaments. The analysis of this painting made during early seventeenth century in the Indian subcontinent will therefore engage the iconology of manuscript painting in the eastern Islamic world in a broad sense.