ABSTRACT
Housed in a repository’s cavernous vaults is a dazzling folio. On the verso, wide borders frame a box composed of a crimson and cobalt checkerboard containing seven lines of text written in an angular script in gold ink. The upper and lower borders are filled with festoons, and the left and right borders are divided into stacks of small and large compartments. The four small compartments bear letters written in silver ink on crimson grounds. The four large compartments accommodate male figures, three with heron’s heads playing stringed musical instruments. Ananda Coomaraswamy’s influential History of Indian and Indonesian Art may be pulled off a shelf and quotations from it offered in support of the proposition. In this classic survey, the pioneering art historian first wrote that the paintings in Jaina manuscripts featured “constantly repeating compositions, varying only in unimportant details” and did not contribute to nurturing any mood or emotion in their viewers.
