The Curious Madonnas of India

__"The Indian Conquest of Catholic Art" by Gauvin Alexander Bailey, in Art Journal (Spring 1998), College Art Assn., 275 Seventh Ave., New York, N.Y. 10001.__

It was by conquest, not choice, that the art of the Amerindians of early colonial Latin America became more European. But in 16th- and early 17th-century India, the story was different. There, writes Bailey, a profes-sor of Renaissance and Baroque art at Clark University, the Mughal emperor elected, on his own initiative, to serve as a patron of Catholic religious art. "The result was the most visually potent figural iconography ever devised by an Islamic power."

Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605), a descendant of Ghengis Khan and ruler of the most powerful Muslim state on earth, had "a passion for world religions and late Renaissance art," Bailey says. In 1580, he invited a Jesuit mission to live at the royal palace in Fatehpur Sikki and take charge of his art projects. "In open defiance of Islam’s traditional abjuration of figural art, the Mughal royal family evinced an active interest in—and even open worship of— Catholic devotional images."

Akbar directed his artists to paint hundreds of iconic portraits of Jesus, Mary, and various Christian saints to decorate books, albums, and jewelry. The images also were used in court rituals and at coronations and other major royal festivities. "The dramatic culmination," Bailey says, "came when imperial throne rooms, harems, tombs, and gardens were prominently adorned with mural paintings of Christian figures." European visitors took this to mean that the Muslim regime was on the verge of conversion, but, in fact, the Mughals were using the Christian art for their own purposes.

As Muslims presiding over a predominantly Hindu people, Akbar and his son Jahangir (r. 1605–27), who succeeded him, encouraged religious tolerance and "forged a syncretic ideology of kingship that would reflect the multicultural makeup of their growing empire, while promoting their own unifying image as divinely chosen rulers" for the new Muslim millennium that began during 1591–92. They used the Catholic art to provide a visual manifestation of this ideology.

Jesus and Mary figure prominently in the Koran and are revered in traditional Islam, Bailey notes. "It is quite possible that the Mughals chose Catholic imagery because Islam itself did not provide an iconographic tradition capable of combating the visually potent pantheon of Hindu deities."

Whether in official settings or more intimate ones, the Catholic-inspired murals were meant for only a limited audience, Bailey observes. "Christian devotional pictures were painted on a small scale and never appeared on the exteriors of buildings, perhaps so as not to offend the religious sensibilities of the general public." The Mughals’ murals, he says, were intended only for those "sufficiently immersed in palace culture" to understand their syncretic message.