Religious Art & Worldviews · Artists
The family workshops of western India that painted the Kalpasutra and the Jain lives in gold, lapis, and red — hundreds of copies, one devotional economy.
Tagged: Manuscript Illumination Early Modern Devotional Iconic Manuscript Production Jain Shvetambara
Jain merchants commissioned illustrated manuscripts as merit, and Gujarat's ateliers — scribes, painters, and goldbeaters working as family firms — supplied them in a house style: flat red grounds, gold leaf, figures in profile with the further eye floating free.
The pictured folio is their product and this section's Kalpasutra entry: a book made to be worshipped as well as read.
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Related Across the Site
- A Kalpasutra Folio Art Entry — One painted page from the most copied book in Jainism: the lives of the Tirthankaras in gold and ultramarine, read aloud and shown to the congregation during Paryushana.
- The Dilwara Temples Art Entry — Five Jain temples on Mount Abu whose plain exteriors open into marble interiors carved to the thinness of lace — the summit of Jain temple art.
- The Guru Granth Sahib, Enthroned Art Entry — The Sikh scripture is not shelved but enthroned — installed under a canopy on a raised seat, fanned with the chaur, woken each morning and put to rest each night, because it is the Guru.
- Caravaggio Artist — The painter who dragged sacred history into a Roman tavern's light — saints with dirty feet, apostles recruited from the street.
- Kamal ud-Din Behzad Artist — The master of the Timurid miniature, head of the royal atelier at Herat, whose building sites, gardens, and crowds set the Persian standard.
- Michelangelo Buonarroti Artist — Sculptor of the Pietà and the David, painter of the Sistine ceiling — the Renaissance's defining sacred artist, shown here in del Conte's portrait.
- Rembrandt van Rijn Artist — The Dutch master who painted the Bible as an interior event — and painted himself, at every age, as its witness.
- The Janamsakhi Ateliers Artist — The painters of the janamsakhis, the illustrated lives of Guru Nanak. This directory's image for them is a manuscript's opening folio of text — no figure of the Guru — by the community's guidance.