🎄🎄Morbid Christmas Cards and Mughal paintings with Biblical imagery

Express Research

EXPRESS RESEARCH

Dear reader,   Wishing you a very Merry Christmas. Did you know that there have been moments in the past when Christmas cards have provoked outrage? Popular Christmas cards of the Victorian era depicted disturbing images like boiled children and dead birds. The idea, it is believed, was to comment on the low life expectancy rate during the harsh winters of the times. In the late 1940s, the surrealist  Salvador Dali produced a set of Christmas cards challenging conventions. Among them was one with an image of a headless angel playing a lute and a Christmas Tree made of butterflies. More recently, the street artist Banksy used his Christmas graffiti to make commentaries on political matters like the Israel-Palestine Conflict. In this week’s story, Deeptesh Sen takes us on a journey through the history of morbid and outrageous Christmas cards.    One other Christmas story to look out for is one on a collection of Mughal paintings that were inspired by Christian imagery. There were several images of Mughal rulers with Biblical characters in the murals above, therefore serving the purpose of religious justification for Mughal rule.    Read the stories: From headless angels to boiled children: A brief history of macabre Christmas cards by the world’s greatest artists   When Mughal rulers borrowed from Christianity to produce exquisite art works   Sincerely, Adrija Roychowdhury

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When Mughal rulers borrowed from Christianity to produce exquisite art works   From headless angels to boiled children: A brief history of macabre Christmas cards by the world's greatest artists   Christmas special: How the earliest Christians of India absorbed Hindu traditions   What the warming of relations between Israel and UAE mean for the Middle East

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