Jaunpur painting does not seem to have survived the sixteenth century and for our next illustrations of the theme, we must turn to the school of painting fostered by the Mughals.  During the sixteenth century at least three Muslim states other than Jaunpur itself had possessed schools of painting—­Malwa in Central India and Bijapur and Ahmadnagar in the Deccan.  Their styles can best be regarded as Indian offshoots of a Persian mode of painting which was current in the Persian province of Shiraz in about the year 1500.  In this style, known as Turkman, the flat figures of previous Persian painting were set in landscapes of rich and glowing herbage, plants and trees being rendered with wild and primitive vigour.  In each case the style was probably brought to India by Persian artists who communicated it to Indian painters or themselves adjusted it to local conditions.  And it is this process which was repeated but on an altogether grander scale by the Muslim dynasty of the Mughals.  Under the emperor Akbar (1556-1605), the Mughals absorbed the greater part of Northern India, concentrating in one imperial court more power and wealth than had probably been amassed at any previous time in India.  Among Akbar’s cultural institutions was a great imperial library for which a colony of artists was employed in illustrating manuscripts in Persian.  The founders of this colony were Persian and it is once again a local style of Persian painting which forms the starting point.  This style is no longer the Turkman style of Shiraz but a later style—­a local version of Safavid painting as current in Khurasan.  With its lively and delicate naturalism it not only corresponded to certain predilections of the emperor Akbar himself, but seems also to have appealed to Indian artists recruited to the colony.  Its representational finesse made it an ideal medium for transcribing the Indian scene and the appearance at the court of European miniatures, themselves highly naturalistic, stimulated this character still further.  The result was the sudden rise in India, between 1570 and 1605, of a huge new school of painting, exquisitely representational in manner and committed to a new kind of Indian naturalism.  Such a school, the creation of an alien Muslim dynasty, would at first sight seem unlikely to produce illustrations of Hindu religion.  Its main function was to illustrate works of literature, science and contemporary history—­a function which resulted in such grandiose productions as the Akbarnama or Annals of Akbar, now preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum.[74] None the less there are two ways in which Mughal painting, as developed under Akbar, contributed to the Krishna story.  Akbar, although a Muslim by birth, was keenly interested in all religions and in his dealings with the Rajputs had shown himself markedly tolerant.  He desired to minimise the hatred of Muslims for Hindus and believing it to arise from mutual ignorance, ordained that certain