The Golden Age of Mughal Painting Takes Shape Under Akbar
Persian masters and Hindustani artists fuse two traditions into a new imperial style, starting with the Hamzanama
Quick facts
- Project
- The Hamzanama, or Book of Hamza
- Scale
- 12-14 volumes of about 100 paintings each
- Production period
- c. 1562 to 1577
- Surviving folios
- Fewer than 200, split mainly between Vienna's MAK and the V&A
What happened
In the royal House of Books, or Ketabkhana, Akbar had Hindustani artists directed by two Iranian masters formerly in his father's service to produce a new style of book painting, combining the traditions of Hindu and Muslim craftsmen from across the subcontinent with those of Iranian masters. Their first major project was the Hamzanama, or Book of Hamza, illustrating traditional oral tales of the hero Hamza; contemporary sources put the work at 12 to 14 bound volumes of roughly 100 paintings each, produced over about 15 years, most likely between 1562 and 1577. Fewer than 200 of the original paintings survive, separated from their long-vanished bindings; the largest surviving groups are held today by the MAK museum in Vienna and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the latter having acquired 28 folios and two fragments in 1880-81 during a buying trip to Kashmir.
Why it matters
The Hamzanama project established the working method, in the House of Books, of teaming Hindu, Muslim, and Iranian artists on a single manuscript, and this hybrid workshop model produced the distinctive Mughal painting style that would reach its height under Jahangir and Shah Jahan. It marks the moment Mughal visual art stopped being an import and became its own tradition.
How we know
Surviving Hamzanama folios are physically dated by their materials and style, and museum acquisition records, including the V&A's account of Caspar Purdon Clarke's 1880-81 purchasing trip to Srinagar, trace how the surviving paintings left India and entered Western collections.
Sources
- Victoria and Albert Museum. The arts of the Mughal Empire · Reputable sourcevam.ac.uk · The domain "vam.ac.uk" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Victoria and Albert Museum. The arts of the Mughal Empire · Reputable sourcevam.ac.uk · The domain "vam.ac.uk" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Part of a timelineThe Mughal Empire25 events · A Timurid prince crosses the Khyber Pass with cannons and founds an empire that builds the Taj Mahal, then unravels under its own weightView all →