ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses the historiography on the Mughal pictorial oeuvr. The rare aesthetic interpretations of this material are questionable, particularly in their interpretations of hybridity. The chapter also focuses on the conceptualization of the Persian album as an artistic medium following particular artistic conventions and cultural customs that form a compound of external and internal evidence. It illuminates the constructivist workings of geometry in the paintings' semiotic and plastic structure. The challenging hybridity of the Mughal pictorial aesthetic nevertheless forces the admittance of processes of Mughal-European cross-fertilization. Other historians of Mughal art, while not tackling the topic of hybridity with an elaborate introductory reflection as did Bailey, share with him problematic features in their interpretation of the European factor. Hybridity has been mainly approached in the framework of the traditional iconographic-stylistic inquiry. One argues that hybridization automatically engenders syncretism and that the latter only specifies the traits immanent to hybridity. The chapter describes the conjunctive synthesis corresponds to the syncretistic hybridity.
