IRAN AND THE WORLD IN THE SAFAVID AGE
Abstracts

Stronge, Ms. Susan, Victoria & Albert Museum, Asian Department, London, Gardens of the Mind - Safavid Influence on the Development of the Mughal Floral Style

The characteristic flowering-plant motifs of Mughal art are usually said to owe their naturalistic form and symmetrical arrangement to the direct influence of Western herbal engravings arriving at the court in about 1620.  The evolution of Mughal floral design, however, is complex and cannot be understood without analysing its profound debt to Safavid art.

The stylised Safavid plant forms ubiquitous in Mughal painting throughout the second half of the sixteenth century are the obvious result of the presence of the two Iranian masters, Mir Sayyid 'Ali and 'Abd us-Samad, as directors of the new studio established by Humayun.  Their training, combined with the example of illustrated Safavid manuscripts in the royal library and the arrival of other Iranian artists and craftsmen at court, ensured that Mughal artists continued to be exposed to Safavid idioms.  The specific convention of depicting flowers in single rows, long apparent in Iranian art in different media, is found in Mir Sayyid 'Ali's paintings, and remained as a minor theme of floral representation in the early seventeenth century.  By about 1615, under Jahangir, plants of Safavid appearance began to include naturalistic touches as leading artists of the court studied flowers in the wild.  At the same time, experiments were made in the arrangement of flowering plants in design: in architecture, for instance, they appear in multiple rows, and on Jahangir's 1028/1618 jade inkpot as a straight frieze, each plant enclosed within a cartouche.

The influence of European herbals is clearly apparent only in Shah Jahan's reign, by which time flowering plants had gained their own, instantly identifiable, Mughal character.  A new relationship with Safavid art then began, as a fashion for painting flowers in the Mughal style developed in Iran.  The most spectacular example of this is provided by the St Petersburg album, which includes flower studies and floral margins signed and dated by Safavid artists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century.

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