Manuscript illumination

Beside the temple wall, the island’s painting kept a second, smaller home: the book. For centuries the Sinhala manuscript was written on ola, strips cut from the talipot palm, the letters incised into the leaf with an iron stylus and darkened with lampblack. Such books were made to be read rather than looked at, and most carry no pictures at all, for the leaf was precious and the text was the thing.

Where the art of the manuscript lived instead was on its covers, the pair of wooden boards, kamba, that bound and guarded the leaves. These were carved, lacquered and painted, sheathed at times in copper, silver or ivory, and the finest of them are small works in their own right; the painted covers of the Saratthadipani, with their dancing figures, are among the earliest and best.

Painted illustration within a manuscript was rarer, kept for particular kinds of book: medical treatises that needed the human figure drawn clearly, astrological and ritual texts, and, by the Kandyan centuries, a few illustrated Buddhist manuscripts on imported paper, among them a book of a hundred and fifty leaves illuminated by Iruyagama Dharmadassi in 1811. It is a thin tradition beside the great temple murals, yet a true one, the same hands and the same sacred subjects carried into the compass of the page.