Ragamala Paintings. Poetry, Passion, Song
di // pubblicato il 06 Febbraio, 2012
London finally makes a bow to indian miniatures. Until 27th May 2012 Dulwich Picture Gallery will hold, close to a permanent beautiful collection, an exhibition displaying a rare grouping of about twenty objects from the Claudio Moscatelli Collection. The selection covers the whole of the Indian subcontinent: from the plains of Rajasthan, to the Pahari region in the foothills of Himalayas, down to the Deccan and up to the mountains of Nepal.
Ragamala Paintings from India: Poetry, Passion, Song is one of the first exhibition dedicated to this topic.
For 500 years it was one of the most prolific genres of Indian miniature painting, yet the term ragamala has a less clear meaning, frequently confused for the name of an artist or school of painting. Italian born Claudio Moscatelli “discovered” this art in a very accidental way at the Victoria and Albert Museum and standing in front of this kind of beauty murmured: ” in the moment I set my eyes on them I felt the connection with my Italian roots; I noticed a sort of similarity between Sienese primitive painting and some Indian miniatures – the strange perspectives, the colourful buildings, the use of figures to tell different stories and the two dimensional modeling as well…”. Totally bewitched by this arcaic relationship, Claudio travelled to India and felt immediately in love with ragamala paintings.
The first known document of ragamala painting is a series of forty-two ragas (melodic tones in classical indian music) and raginis (their feminine adverse part) used as a decorative device on the margins of an incomplete Kalpasutra manuscript dated to c. 1475, from Western India.
Art and music here were always linked and ragamala paintings became the pictorial depiction of traditional musical tones; every representation was frequently associated with a brief caption or short poem that described the raga’s mood: love and devotion were the feelings the artist employed the most.
This theme has been an endless source of inspiration both in secular and religious contexts. In the wake of devotional movements which swept through north India from about the 14th century, both Hindu and Muslim mystics interpreted love in separation as an allegory of the human soul divided from God personified by the virahini, the woman separated from her lover.
By the middle of the 16th century ragas and raginis no longer depicted deities, but human beings. The landscape, barely hinted at in the c. 1475 ragamala and architectural surroundings, played an important role in defining the space in which the action took place.
The elements which played a pivotal role in this conceptual leap were the spread of the Bhakti movement and, as a consequence, the development of poetry in the vernacular languages. Compositions began to become more wordly, giving the chance to human beings to identify themselves in the stories they looked at.
Animals played a supporting role in a number of paintings. Each one represented an important emotional component of the larger tale; for example, giving courage to the hero or conveying a sense of calm or annoyance, or just providing companionship for a solitary hero.
Ragamala were not made to hang on a wall; they are tactile objects for private consumptions. Each set of thirty or forty loose pages were sometimes bound or left as a set and stored on a shelf. At special events they would have been passed round fellow connoisseurs after shared food and music. Luckily the gentle life of a ragamala has allowed their exquisite colours to be preserved. The natural pigments, made form minerals, insects and flowers, still appear to glow after centuries.
Ragamalas seem at first glance to be carefully constructed and artfully controlled, yet they capture moments of great passion, pain and power.
Skilled and patient artists became real “chasers” expressing intense emotions within classic formulas just to gently restore polished worlds. On the surface, the painting style appears peaceable, but the underlying sentiments evoke excitement and terror, loss and longing, victories and defeats.
Heroism, chivarly and romanticism, so important for Rajput nobles and warriors, found in these miniatures an ideal stage in which express themselves…poetry, passion and songs always with them.