by Jon Lackman | 11 October 2007 | Asia, Books
Also reviewed in the April 2007 Art History is The Empire of the Great Mughals: History, Art and Culture by Annemarie Schimmel. Gregory Minnisale writes:
Professor Annemarie Schimmel passed away in Bonn, Germany, on 26 January 2003 at the age of eighty. One of the world’s foremost experts on Islamic culture, history and thought, her publications included hundreds of articles and books on Sufism, poetry, calligraphy and art … [this] is a broad study of all aspects of Mughal life, from biographic details of the emperors and their families … [to the] status of the elephant in Mughal society … The Mughals lived in a society of the spectacle, organized by strict principles of visual order. Historical, literary, biographical sources point to an almost limitless ordering of visual experiences. An overwhelming range of refined, luxury objects was produced for the Mughal elite, and they avidly collected and catalogued a wide variety of naturally occurring substances, flora and fauna, all to excite, enrich and refine visual sensations … Schimmel’s introduction to the history and culture of the Mughals stands out from so many other bland examples of the genre … It might seem churlish in view of the high priase of much of this review suddenly to introduce a note of doubt about some of Schimmel’s work, but in the field of art history, Schimmel does not achieve the kind of originality or incisiveness that she does elsewhere. Art has a purpose for Schimmel, and that is to substantiate aspects of material culture … Over-emphasizing illusionism and confounding it with scientific naturalism misinterprets Mughal art and represses its formal aesthetic properties, which are very much part of its nature. In Mughal culture, the act of painting brought nature into existence in the form of an aesthetic perception.
