Kalpasutra Manuscript Illustrations

Kalpasutra Manuscript Illustrations gathers painted folios from the Kalpa Sutra, one of the best known and most fundamental scriptures of the Svetambara Jain canon, written in Ardhamagadhi Prakrit partly in prose and partly in verse and containing the biographies of the Tirthankaras, most notably Parshvanatha and Mahavira. The Kalpa Sutra is a key source for Jain art precisely because it is among the most frequently illustrated Jain scriptures, its painted folios developed to pass on the text's central episodes and themes and, over centuries of copying, settling into a recognizable set of artistic conventions used across a large body of surviving manuscripts. This group anchors two works held in this atlas drawn from that illustrated manuscript tradition, a folio depicting Mahavira preaching to monks and nuns and a set of folios from the Devasano Pado Kalpasutra, both objects created for recitation and veneration during the Svetambara festival of Paryushana.