Renaissance as Refreshment in the Mughal Empire

With their depictions of springtime vines, short-lived blooms, and flitting butterflies, monumental floral carpets made or sourced in the mid-seventeenth-century metropolis of Lahore (present-day Pakistan) contributed to an aesthetics of “freshness” that flourished in the early modern Mughal Empire (1526–1858). The concept of a “fresh style” (tarz-i taza) emerged in the writings of late sixteenth-century Mughal poets who lived or passed through South Asia, and was used to refer to a new form of Persian-language poetry rich with complex metaphors and vivid imagery. ¹ The poets were described as taza-gui (“fresh speaking”) and they likened their poetic practice to the cultivation of a garden with slips of green plants and growing seedlings. At a time when poetry conjured freshness and flowers, visual references to gardens also abounded in Mughal floral carpets that depicted species of lilies, irises, and tulips that were cultivated in the imperial gardens of Lahore and further north in Kashmir. When their weaving was complete, the floral carpets spanned outward from Lahore to courts throughout South Asia, meaning that the freshness of Lahore, the “city of gardens,” continually inspired and renewed the environment of drier, hotter regional courts. ²