27 Video Views·Aug 14, 2026
The great age of Mughal art lasted from about 1580 to 1650 and spanned the reigns of three emperors: Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan. During this time, Hindu and Muslim artists and craftsmen from the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent worked with Iranian masters in the royal workshops to produce exquisite and unrivalled works ranging from paintings, illustrated manuscripts, brilliantly coloured carpets, and delicate textiles, as well as architectural pieces and vessels made of mother of pearl, rock crystal, jade, and precious metals.
The richly detailed, vibrant paintings and illustrated manuscripts, such as the Hamzanama, Akbarnama and Jahangirnama, recounted popular stories and documented court life. The pigments used in their creation were derived from mineral and organic sources.
In this film, Anita Chowdry, visual artist and long-term researcher and lecturer in the Arts of the Book and painting in the Islamic world and Indian subcontinent, demonstrates the traditional, painstaking method of creating blue pigment from lapis lazuli and green pigment from malachite stones.
00:00 Introduction to Mughal painting
00:17 Meet Anita Chowdry, pigment expert
00:37 Pounding and grinding the malachite stone in a pestle and mortar
01:11 Removing impurities via levigation - ASMR alert!
02:29 Mulling the paste to make it finer
02:52 Lapis Lazuli - the colour of kings
04:05 Adding gum arabic and honey to make paint
04:39 Mulling until it swishes – very satisfying!
05:37 Painting with the finished pigments
06:05 Burnishing the lapis lazuli pigment with an agate stone
Find out more about the arts of the Mughal Empire: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-ar...
Discover more in our exhibition The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence: https://www.vam.ac.uk/exhibitions/gre...
One of the hallmarks of Mughal painting is the purity and clarity of the colours.
It's very, very seductive. I chose to demonstrate the production of two very important colours
in the palette. One is lapis lazuli and the other is malachite. The process is very similar.
You start by selecting the highest quality you can get. You then break up the mineral.
Sometimes you can actually spend several days pounding away. The next job is to try and remove
natural impurities and we do this using a universal method known as levigation.
And that's a little bit like cleaning rice. You pour a lot of water onto it and you stir it around
and the heavy colour particles will sink to the bottom and all the rubbish and stuff you don't
want is swirling around in the water which you pour off. Once you've got it to a certain level
of clean you'll see that the mineral separates itself into three distinct layers. At the top
we get the finest particles which are responsible for those shades that you see in Mughal painting.
We're now going to use the ground glass sheet to grind it a little more. Another colour that
was very important in Mughal painting is lapis lazuli. It was mined in only one place
in Afghanistan and it was the colour of kings. It is famously one of the hardest rocks to grind.
Once the mineral is dry ground we introduce water. Having washed the pigment you come to
the point where you're ready to make the paint. First of all I add gum arabic. That's what sticks
the particles together into the page. Other additions like honey or milk improve the
application. You often get an idea that the pigment is of the right consistency by the sound
it makes when you mull it. So instead of having that sandpaper sound you end up with just a
whisper sort of a swish. I feel very authentic when I'm working with mineral pigments.
There's something immensely satisfying about getting into that visceral involvement with
the entire process. Lapis lazuli it's a bit of a prima donna when you come to use it
because it absolutely won't respond to being laid in an even flat layer. So one of the ways to
overcome this is to burnish each layer with a polished stone like an agate.
What this actually does is to embed the particles of colour into the surface
and this is one of the reasons why the pages of Mughal manuscripts tend to retain the crispness
of the colour. I feel it's important to go to the panes to try and understand how the original
masters worked. It absolutely widens and deepens our understanding of the art form
and answers a lot of questions about why things were painted in the way they were.
