The notion of a “likeness” or “portrait” – as art historical writing in European languages terms it – took on many different forms in the universal empires of Asia during early modern times. Though abundantly produced – painted or drawn – portraits of kings and nobles were said to be marked by a degree of circumspection stemming from anxieties about representing the human image, even as being open to possibilities offered by naturalist forms that came with European portraits. The talk examines the tensions that operated along different axes governing the creation of imperial “likenesses” in early modern South Asia in a historical context of intense transculturation: tensions between the verbal and pictorial, veristic and formulaic renderings, between an aesthetic of containment and a display of bodily expressivity. Unravelling the dynamics of appropriation, domestication and refusal in relation to circulating aesthetic genres remains a methodological challenge to the conceptual apparatus of an art history as it strives for a lingua franca that would plausibly accommodate plurality and difference.

Im Rahmen der Vortragsreihe "Global Arts in the Early Modern World. Kunstgeschichte der Welt 1300-1800"