Maharana Amar Singh II, Prince Sangram Singh and Courtiers Watch a Performance

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This scene of actors and acrobats performing for the maharana exemplifies the changes that were taking place in painting during Amar Singh II's reign. Like his seventeenth-century predecessors, the artist has depicted several moments in time simultaneously; however, he is no longer strictly dividing the moments from one another. Instead, he has collapsed time, picturing different episodes side by side while making no attempt to clarify the sequence in which they occurred. The artist merely hints at temporal disjunctions through shifts in scale, showing the ruler and his nobles in the upper left to be larger than the actors below. Such narrative techniques became integral to the pictorial style of the eighteenth century.

Asian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met's collection of Asian art—more than 35,000 objects, ranging in date from the third millennium B.C. to the twenty-first century—is one of the largest and most comprehensive in the world. Each of the many civilizations of Asia is represented by outstanding works, providing an unrivaled experience of the artistic traditions of nearly half the world.

Metropolitan Museum of Art