Indian Miniature Art - Misbah the Grocer Brings the Spy Parran to his House - The Adventures of Hamza - 1570 - Mughal

The Hamzanama recounts the adventures of Hamza, an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad who was a legendary defender of the faith. This painting shows Misbah on the right and Parran on the left as they plot to rescue Hamza’s kidnapped son. It comes from a multivolume, large?scale copy of the text made for the emperor Akbar, which took approximately fifteen years to complete. Unlike most books, its paintings were possibly meant to be held up for an audience while a storyteller recited the text. Mughal paintings are a particular style of South Asian painting, generally confined to miniatures either as book illustrations or as single works to be kept in albums, which emerged from Persian miniature painting (itself largely of Chinese origin), with Indian Hindu, Jain, and Buddhist influences, and developed largely in the court of the Mughal Empire of the 16th to 18th centuries.