Devaragampola Silvattenne Unnanse

Devaragampola Silvattenne Unnanse stands as the finest painter the Kandyan kingdom produced, the man later writers credit with its most brilliant work. He was a silvat unnanse, a monk who kept the precepts without taking full ordination, and he painted under the patronage of Kirti Sri Rajasinha, the king whose reign from 1747 to 1780 revived the temple arts of the hill country.

His masterpiece is the cave temple of Degaldoruwa near Kandy, its walls carried out with the painters of the Nilagama family and finished in the reign that followed his patron’s. The scholarship gives him too the murals of Medawala, the decoration of Ridi Vihara in the Kurunegala country, and a leading hand in the renovation of the great rock temple at Dambulla.

His scenes are crowded, exact and alive to the manners of his day, the Jataka stories set among the dress, gesture and ceremony of eighteenth-century Kandy. In him the Sittara tradition reaches its height.