Zulaykha in her palace and as an elderly woman with Joseph

Zulaykha in Her Palace and as an Elderly Woman with Joseph (c. 1603–07) by Mushfiq (1580s–early 1600s). The text is in nastaʿlīq by Sultan Al Mashhadi, copied in Herat c. 1500–1520. The painting, border, and illumination were added in the Deccan for Mughal minister ʿAbd al-Raḥīm Khan-i Khānān. Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art (2013.315.1). What appears, at first glance, is sheer, organized excess. One painted page, yet it manages to accommodate two stories, two different times, and an architectural world in one regulated zone. The very structure upon which the pictorial passages are painted, however, is less architectural than itself. Arched pink jambs border the room, below them a dado of blue and plaster-ivory articulate the registers of the painted room, while in the upper zone, a gold-scroll and arabesque zone separates the two narrative areas. This zone is heavy with crimson and navy – an ornament associated with the Timurid painting world, which is somehow transplanted to a Deccani Mughal context a century later. In the top panel, Small pictures in the gold zone represent early scenes of the Zulaykha myth. In two miniatures of about half an inch by about three-quarters of an inch, the young Zulaykha, with small attendants of about one third of an inch high, walks beneath trees laden with pale flowers; a pair of deer look on passively in the smaller miniature; two smaller, slender figures of Zulaykha are shown in the left miniature. These miniaturised vignettes could be conceived as “memories.” In the middle panel, the drama becomes immediate and earthly. Zulaykha herself is presented as a blazing red jama and sword-belt, but with the face of youth and beauty. She is advancing towards the seated figure of Joseph. He is the Indian sannyasin or spirit with a tall golden hat and a very loose blue dhoti. The man of the earth has pearls draped about his chest and a light flame at his feet.” His posture suggests vulnerability as she approaches and reaches toward him. She points to the man with a feather tipped wand in a motion of long desire or incantation. Behind her, another female attendant in a darker, reddish, color, hand to chest, witnesses. At the very bottom, on the right, an older woman, who must be Zulaykha at the end of her earthly journey and in sorrowful patience, leans against a attendant, in front of a high vessel with gold decorations, and with pale blossoms in it. Directly in front of her, a man stands fancying a hat decorated with what appear to be bursting feathers, hands clasped calmly. The paper has been gathered in Herat early in the sixteenth century, scribed with the words in the nasta'liq calligraphy style which later Mughal and Deccani artists treasured as the finest specimen of Sultan al-Mashhadi’s hand, intended for Badi al-Zaman Mirza, son of Sultan Husayn Baqara. In adding paintings a century later in the studio of the Khan i Khanan in the Deccan, one is simply practicing a more ancient form of accumulating value of various kinds – Timurid legacy, Safavid authority in writing, Deccani taste in painting – in one single object. The inscription signing off the painting and specifying the year appears quite subtly painted on the brick of the arch above the man in the main story as an architectural detail that is a signifier. This sort of practice of inscribing names often goes with sub-imperial works where the client, who dominates the painting, nevertheless allows the artist’s name to remain there on a building. In Mushfiq’s painting the style is also an argument of sorts. Mushfiq, compared to the established Akbari emperor and court styles, produces a more elegant elongation of figures and a slightly more warmer tone, a bit more the expression of the painting of Safavid Persia. Its architecture is also much more decorated and it’s far more layered, and the colors are more richly applied, more like the expression of painting in the Deccan than the naturalism of Jahangiri style. This is a painting of the Mughal empire working somewhat distant to the emperor, that draws out a kind of rich and decadent style from the Deccan. From a philosophical point of view this painting actually enacts the central argument that the love obsession and the desire for god were not at all opposed but rather that these were on one continuous trajectory. Zulaykha’s obsessive desire for Joseph is an act for the poor soul which is reaching out toward god in what we would call Islamic Sufi interpretation which is embedded in the text. The building that she makes for him with the palace empty is what this darkness does even in paradise when it has no other than a beloved to call its own. And the old woman figure in the back, that is not loss but a full realization because he eventually gives his love and grace to her. The point is that this is not a succession but a collapsing of a spiritual life into one scene.