The Mughals built like Titans and embellished like jewellers. Comment.

Answer:

Percy Brown's celebrated phrase captures the double genius of Mughal architecture: buildings conceived on a colossal scale and executed with monumental grandeur, yet finished with a delicacy of ornament worthy of the jeweller's art.

Building like Titans

• Vast fortress-palaces at Agra, Delhi and Lahore enclosed whole cities within massive walls.
• Fatehpur Sikri was raised as an entire imperial capital in red sandstone.
• The Buland Darwaza, some fifty-three metres high, remains among the loftiest gateways in the world.
• Humayun's tomb introduced the monumental garden-tomb, and the Taj Mahal perfected it.
• The Jama Masjid at Delhi and the Red Fort display an imperial scale and confidence.

Embellishing like jewellers

• Pietra dura (parchin kari) inlaid semi-precious stones into white marble in floral designs.
• Marble screens (jalis) were carved with a lace-like delicacy, as at Salim Chishti's tomb.
• Calligraphy in black marble, as on the Taj, was graded so as to appear uniform from below.
• Itmad-ud-Daula's tomb, called the jewel box, is the finest example of this refinement.
• Gardens, fountains and water channels completed the aesthetic ensemble.

The synthesis and its evolution

• Persian, Timurid and Indian traditions were fused into a distinctive imperial style.
• Akbar preferred red sandstone and bold form; Shah Jahan turned to white marble and delicacy.
• Perfect symmetry, the charbagh plan and the bulbous dome became the style's hallmarks.

The epigram is thus wholly apt. Mughal architecture combined the Titan's ambition of scale with the jeweller's precision of detail, and in the Taj Mahal the two qualities meet in perfect balance. As Percy Brown observed, it is this union of grandeur with refinement that gives the style its unique place in world architecture.