Religious Art & Worldviews · Artists
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.
Tagged: Manuscript Illumination Early Modern Devotional Iconic Janamsakhi Sikh
The janamsakhi literature tells Guru Nanak's life as a chain of wonders and teachings, and its manuscripts were painted in regional ateliers from the Punjab hills to the Deccan: the Guru preaching, traveling, confounding priests and kings, in cycles that ran to dozens of miniatures.
Those narrative cycles are beloved and widely published by the community itself. This site nevertheless follows the stricter reading of Sikh guidance on depictions of the Gurus, and represents the ateliers by the pictured object: a Bhai Bala janamsakhi's opening folio, Gurmukhi text in its gabled frame, where the book — as everywhere in Sikh practice — comes first.
References
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 Golden Temple Art Entry — A gilded sanctum standing in the middle of a sacred pool, reached by one causeway and entered by doors on all four sides — open to every direction and every caste.
- 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 Gujarat Manuscript Ateliers Artist — 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.