Ahmadnagar painting

Mark Zebrowski notes that Ahmadnagar was independent for a shorter time than Bijapur or Golconda, so its painting is the rarest and most elusive of the Deccani schools. He calls its few works majestically austere, with the gentle emotion and brilliant colour of fourteenth-century Italian painting and its gold grounds, and the energy of fifteenth-century Turkman painting in Iran — Turkman princes having migrated, probably with painters, from Tabriz to the Deccan late in that century — yet with an underlying Indian humanism, an interest in the mass and rhythm of the body. ¹

The arts flowered in the late sixteenth century under Husain Nizam Shah I (1554–65) and his sons Murtaza I (1565–88) and Burhan II (1591–95), before the civil wars of the late 1590s and the Mughal capture of the capital in 1600 plunged the country into chaos. ¹ The earliest works are the illustrations of the Tarif-i Husain Shahi (1565), followed by the enthroned sultan in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, probably Murtaza Nizam Shah, which the author calls an awesome symbol of royal power with few equals. ^{2 3} After 1600 nine paintings can be given to Ahmadnagar, eight of them of Africans, their likeliest patron being Malik Ambar. ⁴