Page:The Industrial Arts of India.djvu/135

 excessive minuteness and finish of execution. In this, as in the later work of most styles of art, mechanical virtuosity (to employ an expressive Germanism) was beginning to usurp the place of originality and purity of design.”

The substructures of the palace of Akbar [a.d. 1556-1605] at Agra are of red sandstone, but nearly the whole of its corri- dors, chambers, and pavilions, are of polished white marble, wrought with mosaics and carvings of exquisite ornament. The pavilions which overhang the river are inlaid within and without in rich patterns of jasper, agate, carnelian, bloodstone, and lapis lazuli, and topped with golden domes. “ But the most curious part of the palace/’ adds Captain H. H. Cole, R.E., in his Cata- logue of the Objects of Indian Art exhibited in the South Kensington Museum, 1874, " is the Shish Mahal, or ‘Palace of Glass,’ the chambers and passages of which are adorned with a mosaic of mirrors, arranged in geometrical patterns.” Captain Cole is unable to determine whether this building was the work of Akbar or of Shah Jahan [a.d. 1627-1658], but believes that it was built by the latter.

Mr. Kipling minutely describes the examples of this strange mirror mosaic, or sh/sh-work, to be seen in the Shish Mahal at Lahore. “ The building,” he says, “ is the work of both Shah Jahan and Aurangzib ; and the more gaudy portions are due to the later times of the Sikhs. The effect of the shish, or mirror mosaic, though brilliant, narrowly escapes the charge of vulgarity. The principle on which the work is constructed, particularly in its application to ceilings, is identical with that of many examples at Cairo, and in other places all over the East. Small pieces of wood of suitable geometrical forms, frequently hexa- gonal, are cut out and inlaid with bits of looking-glass, more or less gaudily painted and gilded, separately ; and when all are ready, they are joined together on the ceiling, and the process is by no means so slow and costly as the finished result would lead one to suppose.”