Ascetics, sultans and maharajas, Indian pages of the Musée National des Arts Asiatiques-Guimet

Selected within the MNAAG collections, some 70 of the most beautiful pages of Indian miniatures from the principal painting schools that dazzlingly flourished from the 16th to the 19th century - Mughal School, Schools of Deccan, Rajasthan, and Punjab Hills - highlight a decade of acquisitions that continue to enlarge the rich panorama of Indian painting. An ode to delicacy and refinement. Historic and literary manuscripts, portraits, representations of fauna and flora, court scenes and genre scenes, masterpieces of Persian or Indo-Persian literature, illustrations of the great Epics of Hinduism, personified musical modes (Ragamala), such are the variations of this Indian anthology with its boundless creativity. In 1555, after the Emperor Humayun's return from exile, a particularly brilliant art of the book blossomed, a result of the work of Hindu or Muslim painters gathered since the reign of Akbar (1556-1605) in a same imperial workshop. Thus came to thrive an exquisitely attentive art dedicated to Nature, love of the picturesque, and a singular sense of space, the first stages of a universal art of the book, addressing the grand themes of the human adventure, illustrating epics and the great history chronicles of the Mughal rulers.
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