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A Muraqqa ( , ) is an album in book form containing Islamic miniature paintings and specimens of Islamic calligraphy, normally from several different sources, and perhaps other matter. The album was popular among collectors in the Islamic world, and by the later 16th century became the predominant format for miniature painting in the Persian Safavid, Mughal Empire, and Ottoman Empire, greatly affecting the direction taken by the painting traditions of the Persian miniature, Ottoman miniature and Mughal miniature.Froom. (2001), 1.; Rizvi, 800 The album largely replaced the full-scale illustrated manuscript of classics of Persian poetry, which had been the typical vehicle for the finest miniature painters up to that time. The great cost and delay of commissioning a top-quality example of such a work essentially restricted them to the ruler and a handful of other great figures, who usually had to maintain a whole workshop of calligraphers, artists and other craftsmen, with a librarian to manage the whole process.
An album could be compiled over time, page by page, and often included miniatures and pages of calligraphy from older books that were broken up for this purpose, and allowed a wider circle of collectors access to the best painters and calligraphers, although they were also compiled by, or presented to, shahs and emperors. The earliest muraqqa were of pages of calligraphy only; it was at the court in Herat of the Timurid dynasty prince Baysunghur in the early 15th century that the form became important for miniature painting. The word muraqqa means "that which has been patched together" in Farsi.Froom, 1-2; Thackston, vii
The works in an album, typically of different original sizes, were trimmed or mounted on standard size pages, often with new border decoration being added. When the compilation was considered complete it was bound, often very luxuriously, with an Islamic book-cover that might be highly decorated with paint, gold stamping on leather, or other techniques. Other muraqqa might be bound in a special concertina-like form. Many were arranged with pages of calligraphy facing miniatures, the matching of verse to image allowing some scope for the creativity of the compiler.A regular theme of prefaces - see Roxburgh, 111-112 Albums containing only calligraphy tended to be arranged chronologically to show the development of a style. The bindings of many albums allowed items to be added and removed, or they were just removed from the centre of the page, and such changes were often made; some albums had marks which allow changes to be traced.Froom, 5-6 The grandest albums had specially written prefaces which are the source of a high proportion of surviving contemporary writing on the arts of the book, and the biographies of painters and calligraphers; these tended to be written by calligraphers. For calligraphers too the single page for an album became the "bread and butter" source of income,Canby, quote on 47 using mostly texts from poetry, whether extracts from a long classic or ghazal lyrics, but sometimes an extract from the Qur'an, perhaps given the place of honour at the start of the album. Album pages often have areas of decorated illumination (as in the illustration) that share their motifs with other media, notably book-covers and carpet designs, the best of which were in fact probably mostly produced by the same type of artist at court, and sent to the weavers.Canby, 42-49, 45 on Qur'an, 83 on carpets.
While the classic Islamic illuminated manuscript tradition had concentrated on rather crowded scenes with strong narrative content as illustrations in full texts of classic and lengthy works like the Shahnameh and the Khamsa of Nizami, the single miniature intended from the start for a muraqqa soon developed as a simpler scene with fewer, larger, figures, often showing idealized beauties of either sex in a garden setting, or genre figures from nomadic life, usually with no real or fictional identities attached to them. In Mughal India realistic portraiture, nearly always of rulers or courtiers, became a very common feature, and in Ottoman Turkey portraits of the Sultans, often very stylised, were a particular speciality. Fully coloured scenes tended to give way to part-drawn and part-painted ones, or to figures with little or no background. The album to some extent overlaps with the anthology, a collection of different pieces where the main emphasis is on the texts, but which can also include paintings and drawings inserted from different sources.
The artist who epitomises the Persian album miniature is Riza Abbasi, active from the 1580s until his death in 1635, whose early single miniatures of groups are somewhat like those in narrative scenes, but lacking any actual narrative attached to them. He soon turned to, and developed, subjects mostly of one or two figures, often portrait-like, although very few identities are given or were probably ever intended to be recognised. There are a large number of beautiful youths, to whose clothes great attention is paid.Riza
Turkish albums include mixtures of collected miniatures similar to those in Persia, and often including Persian pieces, with the addition of rather more greatly elaborated pen drawings of an essentially decorative nature, of a foliage motif, or a bird or animal treated largely as such. Albums dedicated to the sultans, with portraits and laudatory pieces of text, are a distinctive Turkish type, and there were also albums of scenes of Turkish life, showing the relatively uniform costume of different ranks in society, methods of torture and execution, and other scenes of interest to the mostly Western foreigners they were produced for, matching similar prints made in contemporary Europe.Titley, 151, 157-158
One very distinctive type of miniature is found only in Ottoman albums, though they may have been brought from Persia as booty, and perhaps were not intended for albums originally. These are eighty or so the mysterious and powerful images grouped under the name of Siyah Qalam, meaning "Black Pen" (or drunk or evil pen), full of demons and scenes which suggest nomadic life in Central Asia, though it has also been suggested that they come from a single Persian court artist letting himself go. They are perhaps from the early 15th century, reaching Turkey in the 16th.Robinson, 37; Walther & Wolf, 254-255
Another distinctive type of Ottoman work is the découpage or cut paper miniature, where different colours of paper, cut with minute detail then pasted together, are used to create the image. This technique was used for book-covers in Timurid Persia, which were then varnished over for protection, but in Turkey the images were treated as miniatures and went inside albums; the technique was also much used for page border decoration. A lion attacking a deer, stencilled scene of découpage paper shapes British Museum; Titley, 158, 229, 242
Akbar had an album, now dispersed, consisting entirely of portraits of figures at his enormous court which had a practical purpose; according to chroniclers he used to consult it when discussing appointments and the like with his advisors, apparently to jog his memory of who the people being discussed were. Many of them, like medieval European images of saints, carried objects associated with them to help identification, but otherwise the figures stand on a plain background.Crill and Jariwala, 66 There are a number of fine portraits of Akbar, but it was under his successors Jahangir and Shah Jahan that the portrait of the ruler became firmly established as a leading subject in Indian miniature painting, which was to spread to both Muslim and Hindu princely courts across India.Crill and Jariwala, 27-39, and catalogue entries
In the 18th and 19th centuries Indian artists working in the hybrid Indo-European Company style produced albums of miniatures for Europeans living in India as part of the British Raj and its French and Portuguese equivalents. Some Europeans collected or were given earlier Indian miniatures; the Large and Small Clive albums were presented to Lord Clive, and are now in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Small Clive album Victoria & Albert Museum. Others created albums of new work, tending to concentrate on animal portraits and the houses, horses and other possessions of this wealthy group. In the 19th century images of Indians and their costumes, often categorized by regional and ethnic type, or occupation, became very popular. Large-scale patrons included Colonel James Skinner of Skinner's Horse fame, who had a Rajput mother, and for natural history paintings, Mary Impey, wife of Elijah Impey, who commissioned over three hundred, and the Marquess Wellesley, brother of the first Duke of Wellington, who had over 2,500 miniatures.
A muraqqa was created for Sultan Murad III in 1572 when he ascended to the throne, which is unusual because the dedication is very detailed, including the date and place of creation, namely Istanbul, 980 AH/1572-73 AD.A. E.Froom, (2001). "Collecting Tastes: A Muraqqa’ for Sultan Murad III". Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies IV: 19, pp. 1. The dedication is to Murad III, also naming his compiler Mehmed Cenderecizade. The Murad III muraqqa was designed much more extravagantly than other Islamic muraqqa and with original nakkashane (Ottoman painting studio) border paintings.Emine F. Fetvaci, (2005). "Viziers to Eunuchs: Transitions in Ottoman Manuscript Patronage, 1566--1617." Unpublished PhD Dissertation, Harvard University. pp. 28. This muraqqa contained miniature paintings, ink drawings, and calligraphy, including ghazals. The Murad III muraqqa has twenty-four miniatures created in the cities of Bukhara to the east of Persia, Tabriz, Isfahan, and Qazvin in Persia, and Istanbul between the late fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.A. E.Froom, (2001). "Collecting Tastes: A Muraqqa’ for Sultan Murad III". Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies IV: 19, p. 2, 7. It has a two-page introduction written in Persian, which is similar in structure to Timurid dynasty and Safavid album prefaces, and indicates that this muraqqa was compiled in Istanbul less than two years before Murad III became Sultan.E.Froom, (2001). "Collecting Tastes: A Muraqqa’ for Sultan Murad III". Electronic Journal of Oriental Studies IV: 19, p. 4.; Sheila S. Blair. (2000). "Color and Gold: The Decorated Papers Used in Manuscripts in Later Islamic Times." Muqarnas. 17. pp. 26.
Another album in the Ottoman royal collection contains only Western images, mostly prints but including a drawing in pen of an Ornamental Scroll with Putti and Penises, "for the merriment of adult guests at a dinner in Pera". The collection was probably assembled for a Florence in the late 15th century, probably a merchant living in Istanbul (where Pera was the quarter for Westerners). The other 15 images are a mixed group of Florentine , mostly unique impressions (i.e. otherwise unknown), with some religious subjects and a coloured print of Mehmet II, who apparently acquired the album. It is of interest to art historians because only a small handful of early albums of Western prints survive anywhere, having been broken up by later collectors or dealers; they were probably common among collectors in Europe at the time.Landau & Parshall, 91-95; one might query the title, as the "putti" are rather rough-looking adults.
Using the emergent tools of digital humanities, Sumathi Ramaswamy at Duke University has recreated the form of a Mughal muraqqa’ to track the itineraries of the terrestrial globe in early modern India.Sumathi Ramaswamy, ‘Going Global in Mughal India’ (http://sites.duke.edu/globalinmughalindia/)
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