The Monk Kalaka Listening to His Master Gunakara Preach

Among the Balkan icons here, this small horizontal leaf comes from somewhere else entirely: western India. It is a page from a Jain manuscript telling the story of the teacher Kalaka. In this scene the young prince Kalaka sits and listens to the monk Gunakara preaching, the moment that moves him to give up his rank and become a monk himself. The long, narrow shape is a habit carried over from older Indian books written on palm leaves, kept even after paper arrived. Painters of this western Indian style had a signature quirk you can spot at once. Faces are shown in three-quarter view, and yet the far eye is pushed out past the edge of the cheek, floating in empty space. It was made around 1450, and the red ground and fine gold are typical of these devotional copies, produced in numbers for Jain families.