Ebba Koch’s Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays contains eleven essays published between 1982 and 1997 on the art and architecture produced under the Mughals (1526–1858), the longest-surviving and richest of all the dynasties to rule the Indian subcontinent. The texts range in length from a short, eleven-page reflection on the impact of the Jesuit Missions on the depictions of the Mughal emperors to a seventy-page, near book-length study of the decoration on the throne made for the emperor Shah Jahan in the Red Fort at Delhi. To meld the essays into a coherent whole, the illustrations from the original publications have been renumbered consecutively and sometimes replaced, and useful features such as a glossary, bibliography, and index have been added.

The author, who teaches art history at the University of Vienna, has also included a brief introduction outlining her purpose and methodology: to make available, particularly to Indian scholars (there is an Indian edition), her articles, which are scattered over a range of journals, festschriften, conference proceedings, exhibition catalogues, and collected volumes, and to address the ideological and social importance of Mughal art. Koch is particularly concerned with the importance of visual evidence in assessing and evaluating literary evidence. As an example, she cites the literary cliché of “sky-touching buildings,” which are in fact rather low and wide, and stresses the importance of understanding the context(s) in which these works were created. She thus contradicts Wayne Begley’s speculative argument (“The Myth of the Taj Mahal and a New Theory of Its Symbolic Meaning,” The Art Bulletin 61 (1979): 7–37) that the Taj Mahal was an allegorical representation of the throne of God, suggesting that this was one more literary cliché. Instead, the author sets the building, to my mind convincingly, in its place in a line of tombs set in a metaphoric garden of Paradise.

The essays deal mainly with architecture, including constituent elements such as the baluster column and its decoration, including stone intarsia, pietra dura, and wall painting, as well as related subjects such as urban planning (specifically, the early history of Delhi) and gardens. Koch deals mainly with iconography and the expression of rulership in art. As the title states, she concentrates on imperial art, and readers should not expect to find any discussion of daily life, material culture, feminism, the gaze, and other trendy subjects.

In arrangement, the articles parallel the author’s transition from a historian of Western art to historian of Indian art. The first five essays are arranged thematically. The first three, written in the early 1980s, discuss how Europeanizing forms of artistic expression were introduced into the Mughal vocabulary to create an iconography of Mughal kingship. They culminate in the fourth and and longest essay, a study of Shah Jahan and the musician Orpheus. The section concludes with the only chapter in the volume on painting: an essay on the hieratic compositions in paintings produced for Shah Jahan during his rule from 1628 to 1657. The remaining six texts investigate various architectural and urbanistic themes, with special emphasis on the reign of Shah Jahan, when the Mughal empire was at the height of its political power and when the visual arts were used deliberately to promote an imperial ideology.

Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology is a welcome addition to the growing field of Mughal art history. Its strength is that it places the art in its broader context, viewing the monuments not only diachronically as examples of Indian art, but also synchronically within a pan-Eurasian context. Many of the essays deal with the transfer of objects, motifs, and even artisans, and raise questions about the reception and meaning of these elements in their new contexts. For example, the Jesuits’ gift of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible to the emperor Akbar in 1580 had an immediate impact on Mughal art and ideology. The scene of Pietatis Concordiae on the first title page showing ox, lion, wolf, and sheep lying down together under the peaceful rule of the Messiah (fig. 1.1) stimulated a series of allegorical depictions of the Great Mughal in which the emperor presides over a peaceful assembly of beasts. The baluster column, part of the scepter illustrated on the second title page of Pietas Regia, or the Piety of Philip II as protector of the Catholic faith (fig. 1.2) and part of the architectural frame for the Pentateuch on the third title page (fig. 3.20), appeared suddenly in the Mughal architectural repertory of the second quarter of the seventeenth century as Shah Jahan adopted the symbolic trappings of absolute monarchy associated with Charles V.

The most nuanced of the arguments is the long study of Shah Jahan’s throne in Delhi, which Koch interprets as the throne of Solomon, with the central decoration executed in pietra dura showing Orpheus surrounded by peaceful beasts, representing an allusion to the ruler himself. She bases her conclusions on a wide variety of literary sources ranging from Biblical tradition and Plato to the twelfth-century Persian lyric poet Nizami (Persian was the court language of the Mughals). This broader view means that the essays will be of interest to a wide range of scholars beyond Indian-art specialists. While this is particularly true of the essays in the first half of the volume, it also extends to those in the second. Her study of copies of the Qutb Minar, the distinctive tower erected in the thirteenth century in the courtyard of the main mosque at Delhi, illustrates Richard Krautheimer’s definition of medieval copying and shows how principles of art history developed for Western art can be applied to other traditions.

One of the author’s strengths is her firm grounding in the monuments themselves: Koch has traveled extensively through the subcontinent, and most of the excellent architectural photographs are her own work. Plans are well drawn, and she describes architecture evocatively and accurately. Koch is careful to draw, for example, a distinction between stone intarsia (in which designs are created by inlaying all types of stone, often marble, into the hollowed-out depressions of larger slabs) and pietra dura (in which designs are created by fitting together pieces of hard stones to form a flat surface). Most of the decoration on Mughal architecture is therefore intarsia, whereas the throne of Shah Jahan is pietra dura. The buildings she describes are some of the masterpieces of world architecture, built with expensive materials and finished with extraordinary care and polish. It is all the more disappointing that the publishers have reproduced all the illustrations, including the polychrome decoration and the paintings, in black and white.

The one area where the author might be criticized is the relative lack of consideration of contemporary monuments in Iran, homeland of the Mughals’ ancestors and the major imperial power to the West. What makes the study of Mughal art so fascinating is the confluence of artistic sources, not only European and Indian, but also pan-Islamic. The architecture of the Shah Jahan period can be profitably compared to that of his contemporary, the Safavid shah ‘Abbas I (r. 1588–1629), who had constructed a new capital at Isfahan just before Shah Jahan began work on his at Delhi. The new congregational mosque in Isfahan (1611–30) was decorated with tile mosaic, the local equivalent in clay of the pietra dura used during Shah Jahan’s reign. Set over the main doorway of the mosque in Isfahan is an unusual depiction of paired peacocks that recalls the large cockerell set below Orpheus in the tympanum at the back of Shah Jahan’s throne. Although Koch draws attention to ancient Iranian traditions of kingship as models for the Mughals, it seems that contemporary ones may well be important, especially as many Safavid artists emigrated to the much richer Mughal court. Nonetheless, it is to the author’s credit that her work opens up the possibility of making such cross-cultural comparisons, and her book deserves to be read by a wide audience.