The Donkey in a Tiger's Skin — Folio from the Tutinama

The thirty-first night of the Tutinama — Tales of a Parrot — in which a poor merchant disguises his donkey in a tiger's skin so the animal may graze freely in fields kept clear by fear. The trick holds until the donkey brays; the disguise unravels and the consequences follow.

The painting is by Basawan, one of the great Hindu masters of Emperor Akbar's atelier, dated to around 1560. Akbar commissioned an illustrated copy of the Tutinama — Ziya al-Din Nakhshabi's fourteenth-century Persian collection of moral fables — and the resulting manuscript runs to two hundred and fifty miniatures, of which this is one.

Basawan is remembered for the psychological humanity he brought even to animal scenes; the donkey here is rendered with the same care normally given to imperial portraiture, which is the quiet point of the fable.

Restored from the museum archives by aurahliving.com.