Nanda and the elders, page from a Bhagavata Purana
1532
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
1532
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Nanda and the elders, page from a Bhagavata Purana is a 1532 unspecified by Unknown, a Mughal Painting work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a bright, busy page from an old Indian book. Krishna’s foster father, in green, talks with village elders under a tree. Above them, a gardener hands a rose to a girl—another story on the same page. The painting stacks scenes like shelves. People and trees line up in flat rows, not like real space. The colors are bold, almost glowing, with no shadows to make things look deep. It’s how artists in northern India told stories before Western rules of perspective arrived. Look up more paintings of northern India to see how they built worlds in layers.
In a page from a manuscript about the life of the Hindu god Krishna, Krishna’s foster father, wearing green, confers about moving their community to a new location. Their current village has been beset by demons sent by the evil king to kill Krishna. Typical of South Asian compositions of the early 1500s, figures and other elements are arranged in horizontal rows. Above, in the story of an encounter between a gardener and a merchant’s daughter who wants a rose, we see use of the same Mughal convention, shown with a more natural conceptualization of space. Mughal compositions were often based…
Read the full account in the museum source.
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