ARTICLE
Manuscript Painting
In fact, within India, manuscripts were made exclusively with palm leaves until the fourteenth century, when paper began to be used in Gujarat for Jain manuscripts. A paper manuscript, called a codex to distinguish it from the palm leaf variety, became the most preferred medium by the early sixteenth century due to its variable size and capacity to hold a wider range of pigments. The palm leaf manuscripts ranged from ten to twenty inches in length, while the codices could reach up to two feet. The codices also had more ornate borders around the images and some of the text as well, likely as a result of Persian influence. Expensively painted manuscripts, especially codices, often used rare or precious materials as pigment, including gold and lapis lazuli, and the high standard for intricate work meant that artists used fine squirrel hair brushes, sometimes comprising a single strand.
Religious Jain and Buddhist texts were the most common illustrated manuscripts of the mediaeval period before the establishment of Islamic sultanates in India. The wooden covers discovered are speculated to have been made for a now lost Buddhist manuscript from the kingdom of Gilgit in present-day Kashmir. Later Buddhist palm leaf manuscripts that have survived were made at the monastic centres of Nalanda and Kurkihar (present-day Bihar) in the eleventh century, as part of a tradition now referred to as the Pala school. Jain manuscripts, usually religious in nature, continued to be produced well into the sixteenth century in Western and Central India, drawing influences from the emerging painting tradition in Safavid Persia through existing trade links across the Persian Gulf. Jain and Buddhist manuscripts typically gave more importance to the text, with the images playing a largely decorative role. In later traditions, however, both text and image were crafted and patronised to an equal degree.
Pluralism has been a major characteristic of manuscript painting in India, with Jain, Hindu and Muslim patrons and artists creating manuscripts with themes that draw from a wide range of religious and cultural material. As a result, there was a rich and rapid exchange of styles in the subcontinent as artists trained in various schools moved from court to court. Beginning with Akbar’s patronage of the art form in the second half of the sixteenth century, Mughal manuscripts became the most influential style in India, attracting painters and calligraphers from across regions and cultural backgrounds, including some from Persia. Mughal painters were also influenced by Western art and adopted some of its attributes, most notably the more naturalistic aerial perspective. At roughly the same time, the Deccan kingdoms that had broken away from the Bahmani Sultanate in the sixteenth century began commissioning illustrated manuscripts of their own, first in a highly original elaborate aesthetic and then in a more noticeably Mughal style. Although some kingdoms in present-day Rajasthan also began patronising manuscript painters around the same time as the Mughal court, the Rajput style emerged in earnest only by the late seventeenth century, as painters left the declining ateliers of the Mughal court. From the early eighteenth century onwards, Pahari painting flourished as a distinct genre in kingdoms established by Rajput kings in present-day Himachal Pradesh.
By the late nineteenth century, illustrated manuscript painting was largely replaced by photography and large Western-style portraiture. These art forms appealed to rulers of the Princely States under British rule both in a technological and cultural capacity. While illustrated manuscripts are no longer produced, the most recognisable styles of such painting have been adopted by several contemporary artists from Pakistan, most notably Shazia Sikander, Bashir Ahmad, Saira Wasim and Imran Quereshi. In India, miniature painting has also been a major influence on artists of the Baroda school and Bengali modernists such as Nilima Sheikh and Abanindranath Tagore.
Bibliography
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