Page from a Bhagavata Purana Manuscript: Krishna and Balarama Enjoy the Rainy Season (Primary Title)
Page from a Bhagavata Purana Series (Former Title)
Illuminated page (Object Name)
Unknown (Artist)
This lively painting comes from an important 16th-century copy of the Bhagavata Purana, a grand work that extols Vishnu as the supreme lord of the universe. The manuscript’s dispersed leaves illustrate the text’s tenth book, which recounts stories of Vishnu’s incarnation as Krishna. Rendered in the so-called Chaurapanchashika style, its paintings feature flat pictorial spaces, compact compositions, a vibrant palette, and figures set against solid-color grounds. The dynamic energy and vivid hues of Chaurapanchashika-style pictures were important to the development of Mughal and Rajput painting.
This leaf illustrates several verses from the text, written on its reverse. Light strokes of white falling from undulating cloudbands in the upper left and lower right rectangles indicate that it is the rainy season. In the upper left panel, the white-skinned Balarama leads his blue-skinned brother Krishna and a cowherd into the forest. At the upper right, Krishna and a woman sit beneath a canopy, enjoying fruits plucked from a nearby tree. Krishna also appears in the middle of the picture, crouching with a companion under a fantastically rendered tree, and at the lower right, seated with four cowherd at the edge of a stream, sharing food from a yellow bowl. Elsewhere, cows and geese frolic in the warm, wet weather.
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