The Chitrasutra is a Sanskrit treatise on painting preserved as a section within the larger Vishnudharmottara Purana, a text otherwise covering a wide range of religious and cultural subjects. Rather than treating painting as an isolated technical skill, the Chitrasutra frames it as connected to dance and sculpture, arguing that a painter who does not understand the principles of dance and sculptural proportion cannot properly understand the rules of painting, a claim that positions the visual and performing arts as sharing a single underlying grammar of proportion, gesture and expressed emotion.
Its content covers practical matters including preparation of surfaces and pigments alongside more conceptual material on proportion, the classification of figure types, and the depiction of mood and emotional states, addressing both religious and secular subjects rather than confining itself to devotional imagery alone. This combination of craft instruction and aesthetic theory has made the Chitrasutra a significant source for scholars studying premodern Indian art theory generally, not only religious painting specifically.
Because so little pre-medieval Indian painting survives physically, especially compared to surviving sculpture and architecture, texts such as the Chitrasutra carry outsized importance for understanding what painters of the period were trained to value and pursue, since the paintings themselves that would confirm or complicate the text's prescriptions have largely been lost.