Arghan Div Brings the Chest of Armor to Hamza

About this Brooklyn Icon

The Brooklyn Museum is commemorating its 200th anniversary by spotlighting 200 standout objects in its encyclopedic collection.

The oversize series known as the Hamzanama is a landmark of Indian painting, the first major product of a workshop formed by the Mughal emperors from a mix of Indian and Iranian artists. Created in the mid-16th century, the Mughal Hamzanama originally had 1,400 pages; they are now dispersed, with many lost or damaged. The Brooklyn Museum has four pages in remarkably good condition. This lively composition shows a benevolent demon—recently converted to the new religion of Islam—helping the hero Hamza by retrieving a chest of armaments from the seafloor.

Hamza’s exploits are depicted on sheets of fabric with pages of text glued to the reverse. This format likely accommodated storytelling performances, with the paintings held up while a narrator read aloud. Multiple artists worked on each page, bringing together their talents and training in Indian or Persian traditions. The bold colors are typical of traditional Indian manuscript painting, while the vertical hillsides and elaborate architecture and textiles draw from classical Persian painting. The charming details of nature and human behavior, however, are not characteristic of either older school.