The Adventures of Hamza: Painting and Storytelling in Mughal India - Softcover

Seyller, John William; Thackston, W. M.; Freer Gallery Of Art; Arthur M. Sackler Gallery (Smithsonian Institution)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1898592233 ISBN 13: 9781898592235

Publisher: Freer Gallery of Art, 2002

Synopsis

The adventures of Hamza (or Hamzanama) is a fantastic adventure story, based loosely on the exploits of Hamza, an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad, who travelled throughout the world spreading the doctrines of Islam. The narrative tells of encounters with giants, demons and dragons; of abductions and hair-raising chases; and of believers, as well as those who resisted the truth. The excitement of the tales was best captured in public recitations, in coffee-houses from Iran to northern India. Each recitation was given a particular flavour by the storyteller, who departed freely from the written text, which varies in composition and structure from manuscript to manuscript. An illustrated version of the Hamzanama was commissioned early in the reign of the Mughal Emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) by the teenage emperor himself. It consisted of 1400 enormous paintings of unusually large format. This was one of the earliest products of the royal Mughal painting atelier, and it was to be perhaps its most ambitious.

The size of the paintings, almost two feet high, can be explained by their role in complementing the recitations, while their sometimes broad and animated style conveys the vigour of the tales. Just over a tenth of the 1400 paintings from Akbar's commission survives today, and this book is a record of an exhibition at which brings together about sixty of the greatest of these illustrations from collections all over the world at the Museum of Applied Arts/Contemporary Art in Vienna. This is the first exhibition of Indian painting to examine narrative aspects of a single text in such depth, while also exploring the Hamzanam's pivotal role in the development of Mughal painting in India.

About this edition

• Publisher: Freer Gallery of Art
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1898592233
• ISBN 13: 9781898592235
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320