Inside a sixteenth-century Indian artists’ workshop: technical and scientific insights into the Dispersed Bhagavata Purana

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.