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Tuti-Nama (Tales of a Parrot)

Unknown

1560

unspecified

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Mughal Painting Renaissance Renaissance

Dominant colour

Tuti-Nama (Tales of a Parrot) is a 1560 unspecified by Unknown, a Mughal Painting work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Unknown
When & what style?: 1560 · Mughal Painting
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

You see a bright, busy scene: a woman in a red dress leans toward a green parrot perched on a stand, while servants and animals fill the room behind her. This painting comes from a book of stories told by a clever parrot to keep a woman from sneaking out. It was made for Emperor Akbar’s court, where artists mixed Persian and Indian styles for the first time. The colors are flat but bold, like a comic strip. To see more work from this time, look up mughal india, court of akbar (reigned 1556–1605).

The story of this work

Overview

The Tuti-Nama , written in Persian in the early fourteenth century, contains a series of fifty-two moralizing tales told by a clever, talking parrot. Each story is intended to instruct Khujasta and distract her from an adulterous affair. The Cleveland Museum of Art’s copy of the manuscript was painted for Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605) and represents the origins of Mughal painting.