Majnun, as a poet in the wilderness whose main claim to fame is love,
already has Orphic overtones in Nizami’s rendition–long before Mughal
painting developed a visual iconography to match.
Layered Orphic associations with Majnun and Plato cannot be reduced
to a simple visual coincidence, as the Orphic implications of
Pythagoreanism and Platonism were both familiar in Nizami’s intellectual
context.^22 Undermining Koch’s suggestion that the Mughals adopted
European forms without recognizing their significance, the interplay
between antique philosophy, Nizami’s poetry, and its visual representation
suggests direct engagement with ancient philosophical texts in both eras.
Mughal interest may have reflected the introduction of Suhrawardi’s
Platonic, illuminationist philosophy by an immigrant Zoroastrian priest
named Adhar Kayvan (b. 1530).^23 This culture was reflected at court:
Akbar’s biographer Abu’l Fazl’s father Shaykh Mubarak was a follower of
Suhrawardi.
In theConstitution of Akbar(A’in-i Akbar; 1590), Abu’l Fazl compares
meaning in European painting to writing:^24
A picture (surat) leads to the form it represents, and this [leads] to the meaning,
just as the shape of a line leads one to letters and words, and from there the sense
can be found out. Although in general they make pictures (tasvir) of material
resemblances, the European masters express with rare forms many meanings of the
created world and [thus] they lead those who see only the outside of things to
the place of real truth. However, lines [khatt: writing, calligraphy] provide us with
the experiences of the ancients and thus become a means to intellectual progress.^25
Abu’l Fazl outlines a semiotics of the image through the same analogy with
writing similarly articulated in Plato’sPhaedrus, where Socrates doubts the
suitability of both media to convey truth because of their deceptive remove
from reality.^26 Yet Abu’l Fazl suggests that the work of the image trans-
cends mere representation through the proliferation of meaning. European
paintings allow truth to shine past the mere appearance of things, toward
the appearance of the real. In this context, the unique illustration of this
scene seems to set Abu’l Fazl’s valorization of painting against the story’s
valorization of philosophy embodied in music. Illustrating musical affec-
tivity through European visual verisimilitude, the painting suggests a
competition between visual and aural representations of truth akin to
that between reason and intuition enacted in Nizami’s narrative.
(^22) Brisson, 2004 :89–92. (^23) Walbridge, 2001 : 91. (^24) Singh, 2017 : 69.
(^25) Koch, 1988 : 210. Detailed transliterations in her translation are suppressed here.
(^26) Plato, 2005 : 63.
Plato and the Organ of Painting 85