Anyone have the Gulshan Album? I am looking for it.
The Gulshan (or rose garden) Album was compiled at the turn of the 17th century by Aqa Riza for my favourite Mughal emperor, Jahangir (previously Prince Salim). A host of exquisite Mughal miniature paintings are cut and pasted into this "deluxe" album (Kavita Singh p. 52). However, this isn't your grade two scrapbook project. Photos are sandwiched perfectly into this extra large album and decorated with exquisite borders, some more detailed than the paintings themselves. Kavita Singh likens this project to modern-day collecting, archiving and "museumization" (52). Aqa Riza was trying to create something cohesive and complete. This, was one of the best examples of album curatorship from the past.
However, the tragedy of the Gulshan Album is the same as the tragedy of most miniature painting. The individual pages, being worth more on their own than bound into a book and sold as one, have been ripped out and scattered in public and private collections in museums across the world. It is tragic to think that we have done the exact opposite of what Aqa Riza was trying to do, this early art history scholar, by taking what was put together in a cohesive way and tearing it apart again.
Aqa Riza's work reminds me of Aby Warburg's Bilderatlas, where he took hundreds of paintings, printed them out, laid them on large black sheets of paper and connected them with tacks and strings. With every mapped out, as a "Bilderatlas" (photoatlas), he was more easily able to understand and make connections between the different paintings. Perhaps, there is a more easy way to do this with our digital tools, but there is something about the physical paper that seems to harness more focus and creativity.
Most of the Gulshan album is said to be housed at the Golestan Palace in Tehran, and it seems other museums that hold fragments of the album are working to digitize their collections. However, far from Tehran, I'm not able to look through it front to back, but can only piece together the fragments of what has been digitised. I hope that someone will take it as their project to digitize all the pages and again create a cohesive album for all the public to see.
Further Reading
Aby Warburg Bilderatlas https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/library-collections/warburg-institute-archive/online-bilderatlas-mnemosyne
Real Birds in Imagined Gardens by Kavita Singh