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Articles by Stephen Markel

Stephen Markel, Ph.D., is the Senior Research Curator of South and Southeast Asian Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
 
Same Source, Different Responses: Two Mughal Reinterpretations of a Flemish Print
Much has been written about the nature of copying in Mughal painting and drawing. This essay will focus on two Mughal reinterpretations of a Flemish print. Mughal artists often responded to the European prints they encountered by reinterpreting the images through a Mughal lens with selective changes in figural style and composition [as well as proportion and perspective]. Important identifications of European prints re-envisioned in Mughal art were seminally recognized by Milo Cleveland Beach, and later principally by Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Gregory Minissale, and S. P. Verma.
Published: April 02, 2025
 
Review Article of Robert Elgood, Rajput Arms & Armour: The Rathores & Their Armoury at Jodhpur Fort
Dr. Robert Elgood is renowned internationally as being among the world’s leading experts in the field of Indian and Islamic arms and armor and has published extensively. His latest two-volume masterful study, Rajput Arms & Armour: The Rathores & Their Armoury at Jodhpur Fort, was written in tandem with his 2015 catalogue, Arms & Armour at the Jaipur Court: The Royal Collection. Together, the two catalogues provide astute historical introductions, exceptionally well-illustrated object entries, and state-of-the-field analyses of two of the most significant intact royal collections of arms and armor.
Published: May 22, 2018
 
The Enigmatic Image: Curious Subjects in Indian Art
For many viewers the rudimentary subject of most Indian paintings is understandable even without a specialist's knowledge of the identity and history of the figures portrayed. However, many works feature complex subject matter, symbolic nuances, and/or compositional substructures that require an in-depth explanation to understand their layers of meaning and raison d'être. Together, these pictorial intricacies form a corpus of subtextual approaches by artists intended to convey deeper levels of interpretation than are apparent at a superficial glance.
Published: July 30, 2015
 
Mughal Jades - A Technical and Sculptural Perspective
As the French physician François Bernier observed in a letter written in 1665 while traveling in Kashmir with the court entourage of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, jade was highly valued by the Mughal emperors. Mughal jade working presumably began under the Mughal emperor Akbar, but did not achieve its full efflorescence as an art-form until the reigns of the two great aesthetes of the dynasty, the emperors Jahangir and Shah Jahan.
Published: July 14, 2008
 
Correlating Paintings of Indian Decorative Objects
Scholars of South Asian sculpture are well aware of the complications involved in attempting to correlate various iconographic textual descriptions with surviving images. Due to the wide range of regional, temporal, sectarian, and artistic variations, it is often unusual to find a close one-to-one match in terms of form and attributes. The situation in correlating decorative objects represented in Mughal and Rajput paintings with extant examples is, unfortunately, much the same as the text-versus-image dilemma.
Published: February 24, 2003
 

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