Jain Miniature Paintings from Western India c6.4

c6.4

The artists delighted in the study of man as they saw him, his pleasures and pains, his beliefs, and his pastimes and amusements. They painted men as they were and not as they should have been. The eventful life of the Blessed One, not only when he was born as Gautama, but also in his previous existences, afforded a right background to the painters, and they seized every incident in the life of Buddha to depict contemporary manners and customs of the people among whom they moved. In short, the pictorial art of the Gupta age is fully representative of the life and culture of the people; abstraction finds little scope in it.