Umar vence a un dragón

This is a single page from one of the most ambitious book projects ever attempted at a royal court. The young Mughal emperor Akbar ordered an illustrated version of the Hamza story, a sprawling cycle of adventures, and a workshop of painters spent about 14 years, into the 1570s, finishing it. The pages are huge for a manuscript, over half a metre tall, so they could be held up and shown to a listening audience while the tale was read aloud. This scene, the hero Umar killing a dragon, is credited to Daswanth, a painter Akbar had spotted, said to have come from humble beginnings and trained under a Persian master at the court. Of the roughly 1,400 pages first made, only a fraction survive, scattered across museums, and Vienna holds the largest single group.