A Painter Known Only by the Book He Illustrated

Art historians studying Western Indian Jain manuscript painting sometimes have to name an artist without knowing the artist's actual name. That is exactly the case here: the painter who illustrated this particular Kalpasutra manuscript around 1475, probably working in the Gujarati city of Patan, left no signature and no independent biographical record, so scholarship refers to the hand simply as the Master of the Devasano Pado Kalpasutra, a name borrowed entirely from the manuscript itself.

The manuscript's own name comes from where most of its surviving pages ended up, the Devasano Pado temple library, a bhandar in Ahmedabad, which still holds the bulk of its original 201 folios. Individual pages have since traveled elsewhere, into institutional and museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so no single visit today shows the complete work. What survives, wherever a given folio now sits, shows a painter working confidently in opaque watercolor and gold on paper, using the era's newly available vibrant palette and the traditional oblong pothi format inherited from earlier palm leaf manuscripts, to illustrate both the Kalpasutra's account of the Tirthankaras and the accompanying Kalakacharyakatha narrative bound alongside it. The name may be provisional. The visual achievement it labels is not.