Man Massaging Woman

Malwa School

c. 1675

Opaque watercolors on paper

Minneapolis Institute of Art

A man massages a woman lying on a bed, with peacocks and architectural elements visible in the background. These two leaves are classic seventeenth-century Malwa school paintings, one of the earliest and historically most important Rajput schools. At Mandu, the capital of Malwa, miniature painting can be traced back to the fifteenth century, when it developed as a variant of the Jain style of western India. By the seventeenth century, however, this purely Malwa style had evolved. Simple geometric compositions predominate, and colors are bold and highly symbolic, while naturalism and volume are negated. Human figures are typically shown against red or green backgrounds, which dramatically flatten the pictorial surface, thereby lessening t