The sibyl tells Caesar that the child Jesus will be greater than him, from a Mir’at al-quds (Mirror of Holiness) manuscript

This painting, from a manuscript about Jesus, was made for the Mughal crown prince Salim (later emperor Jahangir). The text was written in Persian by the Spanish Jesuit priest Father Jerome while he was at the Mughal court in Agra from 1595 to 1614.

Jerome, responding to Emperor Akbar’s intellectual curiosity in Christianity (and hoping to convert him from Islam), composed a text on Christ’s life from sources such as the Old and New Testaments, apocryphal Gospels, and other Catholic texts. The Hindu and Muslim Indian artists crafted their imagery by closely following Jerome’s text, using their own observations of visiting Europeans (especially the Portuguese), and studying the European drawings and prints circulating at court.