Abstract
The Dispersed Bhagavata Purana is the earliest known illustrated manuscript of the Hindu god Krishna’s life according to the Tenth Book of the Bhagavata Purana. Originally comprising more than three hundred loose folios, it was produced in the Delhi-Agra region in northern India around 1520–40 CE, making it the first known large-scale production of an illustrated manuscript of its kind in South Asia. This study, through scientific and technical analyses, closely examines fourteen folios of the Dispersed Bhagavata Purana manuscript from the Harvard Art Museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s collections. The examination of this corpus from the pre-Mughal period, a phase that remains largely understudied from a technical and material perspective, demonstrates how scientific analysis can refine our current understanding of the paintings from the Dispersed Bhagavata Purana manuscript and illuminate broader art-historical questions, including workshop organization and artistic practices during this little-known period.
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Acknowledgements
The authors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Mapping Color in History Project, the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. We thank John Guy, Marco Leona, Marina Ruiz-Molina, and the Department of Scientific Research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as Richard Newman of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Folios from the Metropolitan Museum of Art were imaged by the Sherman Fairchild Center for Works on Paper, Photograph, and Time-Based Media Conservation. We are grateful to Laura Panadero for optical examination of Indian manuscripts at the Harvard Art Museums with support from the Mittal Institute, and to Georgina Rayner for identifying kaolinite as a white pigment using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy. V.P. thanks Qamar Adamjee for conversations on Sultanate manuscripts and for sharing relevant references. C.S.C. acknowledges the Beal Family for supporting her postdoctoral fellowship at the Straus Center and the Dogra Art Foundation for supporting her fellowship with the Mapping Color in History Project. P.K. thanks Radha Pandey for sharing paper expertise. This study and the Mapping Color in History Project were funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (HAA-269007-20, HAA-290367-23). The authors also acknowledge funding from the Lakshmi Mittal & Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University and the Harvard FAS Tenured Faculty Publication Fund.
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Patil, V., Chari, C.S., Eremin, K. et al. Inside a sixteenth-century Indian artists’ workshop: technical and scientific insights into the Dispersed Bhagavata Purana. npj Herit. Sci. (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-026-02491-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-026-02491-x
