Eco-art-histories: Plants and Paintings in the Arts of Asia
This panel explores eco-art-historical analysis to re-evaluate received knowledge about the place of plant lives in painting in Asia. Moving away from the art historical tradition of reading ‘iconographically’ into plants in paintings, we turn attention to the acknowledgement that art and ecological phenomena have always been inescapably entangled and sharpen the focus here on the question of the artist’s place in negotiating their plant worlds—trees, bushes, flowers, weeds.
How did plant ecologies inspire artists of Chinese, Indian, or Persian painting? Is it viable as a critical approach to assume that the European herbals were enough for Mughal painters to learn and include species of flowers in their album paintings? Is Chinese landscape painting in dialogue with the ecologies the artists encountered, or does it simply present formulaic iconographies? Are plants in 14th-century Persian paintings mindless, isolated, and merely mechanical imitations of specimens seen in fragments of Song textiles or Yuan scroll paintings? How did painted plants represent the less explored forms of multiplex culturation and different manners of perceiving and receiving the nature and environment?
This panel invites innovative, interdisciplinary approaches that retool analytical approaches for the study of painting in Asia through the lens of eco-art history. Such retooling may happen through revisiting the relationship between the medieval/early modern Asian artist and their immediate – or mediated – environment and questioning what constitutes and entails the agency of the artist and their subjective experience of or encounter with nature and its consequential translation into art.
Session Convenor:
Sussan Babaie, The Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London
Mahroo Moosavi, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max Planck Institute
Session Speakers:
Peyvand Firouzeh, University of Sydney/University of Cambridge, UK
Sea Coconuts, Ecological Art History and the Origin Stories of Sufi Begging Bowls
The kashkul, commonly referred to as a begging bowl (kase-yi gedayan), is an important attribute of Sufis (Islamic mystics). Used to collect alms as well as carry food and drinks, kashkuls took the form of boat-shaped vessels in a variety of media, including wood, ceramic, and metal, from the medieval period onward. Beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, kashkuls came to be made from coco-de-mer or sea coconuts – a rare species that is native to the islands of the Seychelles in the Indian Ocean. This plant material, known for its long-distance travels, became entangled with the origin stories of the kashkul, as reflected in textual accounts, inscriptions, carvings, and paintings rendered on kashkuls themselves.
Prior to the European colonization of Seychelles in the eighteenth century, origin stories of coco-de-mer featured in shared mythologies across Indian Ocean networks and fascinated early modern natural scientists. In this paper, I ask how perceived knowledge about the origin and efficacies of the nutshell may have informed the adoption of this natural material by Sufis. I propose that the plant material’s biological particularities prompted its imitation in material culture. From the eighteenth century onwards, the preference for sea coconuts was so prevalent that kashkuls made of metal, ceramic, and wood commonly imitated the shape of the coco-de-mer half nutshell, honouring the singularity of this natural material.
Ruiying Gao, Wake Forest University, USA
Exposed Roots: Medicinal Plants in Ming Painting
IHow to discern “medicinal plants” in Chinese painting, and what is their overlooked ecological role in the represented environment? This question is prompted by two well-known Ming (1368–1644) paintings: The Garden for Solitary Enjoyment and Herb Mountain Cottage, which are frequently referenced in scholarship on Chinese art as encapsulating ideals of scholarly reclusion. A close look at them suggests an overlooked aspect of the depicted plants, as both paintings conspicuously feature medicinal plants, ranging from “mushrooms for immortality” (Ganoderma lucidum) and bunch onion (Allium fistulosum L.) to various root plants.
My research demonstrates that depictions of these medicinal plants were shaped by the contemporary visual culture of materia medica (bencao) rather than by formulaic iconographies or horticultural practices. For instance, plants like Chinese ginseng (Panax notoginseng) and Solomon’s seals (Polygonatum sibiricum) are shown with exposed roots. This is unnatural to actual gardening but highly reminiscent of illustrations in bencao books, whose rhizomes were documented for their pharmaceutical efficacy.
This visual discrepancy highlights the dynamics between how Ming people used and represented plants and the way paintings contribute to the aestheticization of the natural environment. By examining the ecology and visual cultures surrounding medicinal plants, I will show how medicine, landscape, and their representations in paintings were intertwined with the mechanisms of cultural production in Ming China, offering a retooling of the art historical approach by foregrounding the environmental, pharmacological, and trans-medium dimensions of the painted plant world.
Jean-Baptiste Clais, Musée du Louvre, France
From Patravali to jade – Plant based vessels in Indian painting and Mughal repurposing of religious symbols
Mughal paintings illustrating private meetings, zenana scenes, royal visits to wise men, and gatherings of sages frequently depict green, leaf-shaped vessels. These objects also appear in some sub-imperial productions and in large numbers in Pahari paintings. Their shape, colour, or the painting’s context identifies them as either green jade cups or patravali (leaf-made bowls and plates still widely used in India today). In these paintings, they are employed in two specific functions: the consumption of food and the offering of flowers. Both practices carry profound significance in India. The use of patravali items is prescribed in numerous Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain texts. They are typically made from leaves of various sacred trees or plants, such as the lotus, sal tree, Ficus religiosa, water lily to name a few.
This observation prompts a reconsideration of aspects of Mughal jade production. A group of Mughal jades exhibits leaf-shaped forms or motifs. Analysis of the plants depicted on these jades reveals that, rather than merely translating a taste for European flowers (such as irises and tulips) into jade, some can be identified as ‘petrified patravali’.
Many of these jades can also be recognised as mendicant bowls. Mughal sovereigns present them to sages as part of their religious policy of accommodating the diverse faith communities of Indian society. This repurposing of Hindu symbols and practices within the imperial Mughal context invites us to reconsider the plants in Mughal art not only as decorative motifs, but also as bearers of profound religious, cultural, and political significance within Indian society.
Sukaina Husain, The University of Edinburgh, UK
From Sap to Substance to Surface: Painting and Extracting Plants in the Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Mughal World
This paper investigates Mughal painters’ descriptions of dye and pigment extraction in their recipe books and examines what their language reveals about the epistemologies underpinning artists’ engagement with nature in the period and region. Through the close reading of understudied Indo-Persian artists’ manuals such as the Alwān al-Ṣuwar (“A Treatise on the Art of Painting and Manuscript Illumination,” seventeenth century), it illustrates that these texts not only provided recipes but also offered insight into artists’ relationships with nature. Detailing the procurement and preparation of vegetal pigments and dyes for the sake of posterity, the Alwān reflects an artisanal approach to engaging with nature, in which plants were not merely resources for production but divinely created entities whose dual “interior” and “exterior”” aspects mirrored the metaphysical structure of the cosmos. Within this framework, artistic mastery lay in the ability to discern a plant’s interior qualities—its moisture, heat, or vitality—through its material surface, whether hard, soft, or fleshy, perceiving how the inner revealed itself through the outer. Artists translated these modes of knowing and seeing into painting, capturing their subjective experiences—for example, in visual depictions of flowering plants (fol. 8a, MS. Douce Or. b. 1, Bodleian Library, Oxford). As texts that codified artists’ experiences with nature through recipes for pigments and dyes, manuals such as the Alwān offer critical yet untapped windows into Mughal artists’ negotiations with the natural world. Their study shows that plant painting was shaped not only by encounters with European naturalism but by local epistemologies of sap, substance, and surface cultivated in workshop practice. Working toward a more situated history of plants and plant painting in early modern South Asia, this paper demonstrates that painters’ manuals are key to reconstructing the historical modes of perceiving and receiving that structured artists’ engagements with the natural world.