Publications by Yael Rice
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum’s “Inside the Collection” series, 2024
Mughal Arts and Culture, ed. Jean-Baptiste Clais and Corinne Lefèvre, 2024
Routledge Companion to Global Renaissance Art, 2024
This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Sometime after the Mughal E... more This chapter has been made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license. Sometime after the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628-58) succeeded to the throne, the royal artist Hashim (fl. seventeenth century) painted his patron's portrait (Figure .2.1). 1 In this work, housed today in the National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C., Shah Jahan appears in strict side profile, a golden nimbus radiating from his head, as three angels emerge from billowing clouds above to deliver to him a crown, a chhatri (parasol), and a shamshir (curved sword). In his right hand he clasps a straight blade sword with a gemencrusted scabbard, and in his left, he holds a large, cut carnelian stone set in gold. The rest of the ruler's accoutrements are similarly grandiose. Pearls, rubies, spinels, and emeralds adorn his rings, bracelets, armbands, necklaces, turban, belt, and katar (a short-bladed dagger with a horizontal hand grip); and his jama (stitched coat) appears to be made of the very finest, diaphanous cotton muslin. Depicted in this fashion, Shah Jahan seems to embody the bountiful natural and human-made riches of the region over which he rules: the most highly prized muslin came from the wealthy Mughal province of Bengal in eastern India, and carnelian, pearls, rubies, and spinels were readily sourced across South Asia. Yet, Hashim's portrait also draws from and subverts the iconography of contemporary European prints, specifically images of the heavenly coronation of the Virgin Mary. Shah Jahan, like his predecessors Emperors Akbar (r. 1556-1605) and Jahangir (r. 1605-27), declared himself to be a savior-sovereign and, thus, comparable to Jesus and Mary. The portrait, in this way, strategically employs European Christian imagery to advance Shah Jahan's own messianic, world-ruling claims. The painting's political value is also registered through its minute details, which invited the viewer to linger for an extended period over its surface, thereby expanding the temporality of Shah Jahan's cosmic majesty. The intricacy of the composition furthermore supplied the evidence of artistic labor and skill that painters, like Hashim, drew upon to advance their stations and vocations at court. Though the initial audience for paintings of this kind was Shah Jahan's court and visitors to it, the imagery nevertheless traveled well beyond this orbit. Hashim was very likely well aware of the potential for his portrait to circulate widely. Absent the use of devices for mechanical reproduction, works like this one enjoyed relatively broad mobility through repeated manual reproduction (i.e., copying by hand). This operation was fundamental to
Readings on Painting, From 75 Years of Marg, 2024
Journal of Early Modern History , 2024
This article considers some of the ways that the Ni'matnāma (Book of delights), a Persian-languag... more This article considers some of the ways that the Ni'matnāma (Book of delights), a Persian-language recipe book composed and illustrated in Mandu, in west-central India, between circa 1495-1505, maps, embodies, and consumes a very particular kind of world, one in which the courtly consolidation of power and authority via extraction, accumulation, coercion, translation, and consumption figure centrally. It is argued that the Ni'matnāma's text and images thematize long-distance travel and the accumulation and mixing of imported and local goods as integral facets of a broader courtly ethos centered upon male sexual expertise, corporeal control, mastery of ethical ideals, and political sovereignty.
In _Old Stacks, New Leaves: The Arts of the Book in South Asia_, edited by Sonal Khullar (Seattle: University of Washington Press), 2023
etween the late sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, manuscript workshops across South Asia create... more etween the late sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, manuscript workshops across South Asia created an astonishing number of albums known as muraqqas, from the Arabic for "patched" or "mended. " In conception and organization, these large, stitched books drew from earlier albummaking traditions associated with the Persian-speaking, or Persianate, courts of Iran and Central Asia, but their contents-encompassing drawings, paintings, calligraphies, and prints-were far more global in orientation. As two of the pages reproduced here, both from the now dispersed Gulshan Album, show, a single muraqqa might contain mid-sixteenth-century Central Asian calligraphies of Persian poetry, seventeenth-century paintings from the Mughal court, and even images inspired by European pictures and prints (figures 4.1-4.2). Animal studies on textile supports and brightly colored margins, both clearly inspired by Chinese exemplars, also figure in the latter album. The muraqqa may be likened to a cabinet of curiosity, to the extent that it functioned, similar to its European counterpart, as a collection of rare, heterogeneous specimens from around the world. Yet, unlike the Wunderkammer, the album was eminently more mobile-and travel it did. During the period in question, large quantities of albums circulated across the Indian subcontinent. They enjoyed far broader appeal, however, as the long-standing presence of South Asian albums in Iranian, Russian, German, Dutch, French, and British hands reveals.1
Art Journal Online, 2023
Teaching for a Future-Oriented Art History
What are the limits and boundaries of our classrooms?... more Teaching for a Future-Oriented Art History
What are the limits and boundaries of our classrooms? Where and how should our syllabi begin and end? These questions have become increasingly weighty since 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic converged with the longer-standing pandemic of systemic injustice in the US to amply demonstrate that our classrooms are not protected from the upheavals of the world around us. In this series of essays on pedagogy, three art historians (Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Yael Rice, and Nancy Um) reflect on classroom experiments—all conducted in 2020, the first year of the pandemic—to expand the purview of the classroom, by inserting into their teaching issues such as ethics, well-being, new research practices, innovations in technology, collaboration, and museum- and collection-based work as fundamental concerns of the discipline. As a group, these three essays, which will appear in succession, consider what the future of the art history classroom might look like, as we face the ever-changing challenges of the twenty-first century.
Ars Orientalis, 2022
The main question that this essay attempts to answer is why and how multiple eighteenth- and nine... more The main question that this essay attempts to answer is why and how multiple eighteenth- and nineteenth-century manuscript ateliers collected and copied (in some cases, repeatedly) painting designs intimately associated with album paintings produced at the seventeenth-century Mughal court. The study argues that the agents of image reproduction, in these instances, find material, corporeal realization in the recursive operations that South Asian painters employed in reproductive pictorial practices rooted in distilling, outlining, and tracing forms; in the apparatus of the album, a book technology that was at once porous and itinerant; and through such less considered intermediaries as pandits, or Hindu knowledge brokers, who facilitated the widespread copying, circulation, and incorporation of Mughal designs in paint over the course of three centuries.
Canons and Values: Ancient to Modern, 2019
The Mughal court produced a staggering number of manuscript Paintings During the latter half of t... more The Mughal court produced a staggering number of manuscript Paintings During the latter half of the sixteenth century alone, the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-16o5) commissioned more than twenty-five illustrated manu scripts, some containing in excess of two hundred full-page paintings The get gantuan Hainzanama (Book of Hamza), which reportedly took flfttcn years to complete, from circa 1562 to r577, originally comprised as many as fourteen hundred large-scale folios, each bearing paintings on one or both of its sides.'
The Moon: A Voyage through Time, 2019
Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India, 2018
These are the _proofs_ of an essay now published as “The Global Aspirations of the Mughal Album,”... more These are the _proofs_ of an essay now published as “The Global Aspirations of the Mughal Album,” in _Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India_, ed. Stephanie Schrader (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2018), 61–77.
Artl@s Bulletin, 2017
Over the course of Emperor Akbar's long reign , more than one hundred manuscript painters found e... more Over the course of Emperor Akbar's long reign , more than one hundred manuscript painters found employ at the Mughal court. The overwhelming majority of these artists worked in a collaborative capacity. This study uses Social Network Analysis and Digital Humanities methods to analyze the patterns of artistic collaboration and learning across several manuscript projects of the later sixteenth century. Among the conclusions advanced is that the structure of manuscript illustration project teams, which fostered a large number of acquaintanceships among many artists, facilitated the widespread transmission of diverse practices, thereby contributing to the production of a new, synthetic style.
Book chapter in _Prints in Translation, 1450–1750: Image, Materiality, Space_ eds. Suzanne Karr S... more Book chapter in _Prints in Translation, 1450–1750: Image, Materiality, Space_ eds. Suzanne Karr Schmidt & Edward H. Wouk (Routledge, 2017).
In _Seeing the Past—Envisioning Islamic Art and Architecture: Essays in Honor of Renata Holod_, e... more In _Seeing the Past—Envisioning Islamic Art and Architecture: Essays in Honor of Renata Holod_, ed. David J. Roxburgh (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 151-78.
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Publications by Yael Rice
What are the limits and boundaries of our classrooms? Where and how should our syllabi begin and end? These questions have become increasingly weighty since 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic converged with the longer-standing pandemic of systemic injustice in the US to amply demonstrate that our classrooms are not protected from the upheavals of the world around us. In this series of essays on pedagogy, three art historians (Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Yael Rice, and Nancy Um) reflect on classroom experiments—all conducted in 2020, the first year of the pandemic—to expand the purview of the classroom, by inserting into their teaching issues such as ethics, well-being, new research practices, innovations in technology, collaboration, and museum- and collection-based work as fundamental concerns of the discipline. As a group, these three essays, which will appear in succession, consider what the future of the art history classroom might look like, as we face the ever-changing challenges of the twenty-first century.
What are the limits and boundaries of our classrooms? Where and how should our syllabi begin and end? These questions have become increasingly weighty since 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic converged with the longer-standing pandemic of systemic injustice in the US to amply demonstrate that our classrooms are not protected from the upheavals of the world around us. In this series of essays on pedagogy, three art historians (Susan Elizabeth Gagliardi, Yael Rice, and Nancy Um) reflect on classroom experiments—all conducted in 2020, the first year of the pandemic—to expand the purview of the classroom, by inserting into their teaching issues such as ethics, well-being, new research practices, innovations in technology, collaboration, and museum- and collection-based work as fundamental concerns of the discipline. As a group, these three essays, which will appear in succession, consider what the future of the art history classroom might look like, as we face the ever-changing challenges of the twenty-first century.
As these questions reveal, the collaborative process was not simply sequential, with each artist working singly and in isolation, nor was it fully predetermined. Rather, it necessitated numerous negotiations, and was, in this way, constitutive. By comparing paintings in the Victoria and Albert Akbarnama bearing ascriptions to the same tarh artist, but with ascriptions to different ‘amal and rang-amizi artists, I seek to bring these complex constellations of collaboration into sharper relief, as well as to elucidate the preponderance of tarh in Mughal artistic practice.
This panel asks what a more holistic study of book arts in South Asia would look like. To this end, it investigates a range of bibliographic traditions across time, from medieval painted palm-leaf manuscripts to contemporary artist books, and moves beyond painters and the painted surface to consider the book in a variety of other ways: as a vessel, as a meeting-point for collaboration and collaborative work, as allied with and in conversation with other media, and as a historically charged—and thus politically potent—medium. By placing pressure on more conventional notions of book production, reception, and use, the four papers on this panel invite us to recast South Asian book practices in far more fluid and efficacious terms.
Co-edited by
Suzanne Karr Schmidt, Art Institute of Chicago
Edward H. Wouk, Art History and Visual Studies, University of Manchester (UK)
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