Art and the society that made it

This lesson asks you to explain, from research, how knowing the cultural and historical context of an art work has clarified its meaning, and how works respond to and reflect the society that made them. The museum offers three cases: glass, painting and tile. The research and the comparison with other works come from your class. ¹

List the materials, techniques and patrons each record names. Say which of them you think explains the work best, and what else you would need to find out to be sure.

Choose one feature of a work and show what it tells you about the people who made or ordered it. Mark what the record says and what you are inferring.

Follow the changing patron of one studio. Milo Cleveland Beach writes that the emperor Akbar placed the Iranians Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad in charge of the painting studios, and that what emerged was a new style mixing Indian and Safavid elements ². Under Jahangir the work was organised differently: he preferred small books with few, fine illustrations and single pictures for his albums, and discouraged the Akbari division of one picture among a designer, a colourist and a portraitist ^{3 4}. When Aurangzeb withdrew from active patronage in the 1660s, many painters moved to provincial governors and nobles ⁵.

A name in a record can be a signature, an attribution or an inference. An incised cartouche on the Kaykawus tomb at Sivas gives the master's name as Merendli, and Muhammad al-Majnun is written in tile in the Yesil mosque's royal lodge, which the TDV entry calls the craftsman's signature ⁶. The work at the Yesil mosque is attributed to Ali ibn Ilyas Ali of Bursa ⁶. For a painter's patron, Beach only suggests that Dara Shikoh may have patronised the new direction, since so many major works show him ⁷. The TDV entry does not describe a kiln, a guild or an apprenticeship, and it is about architectural tile, not vessels ⁶.

Jahangir changed how pictures were made, and Ali ibn Ilyas, in the entry's account, learned new techniques at Samarkand. Use the records, and answer the strongest objection to your view: who shapes a work more, the person who pays or the maker who knows the craft?

• Mughal painting: the studios under Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan.
• Potter / tilemaker: the makers' names and what the TDV entry says about each.
• Glassmaking in the early Islamic world: the glass industry and the capitals that drew it.

Read the records on glassmaking in the early Islamic world and Mughal painting. Write a paragraph that explains one work by its patron or its materials, and underline the sentence that comes from the record.