Mahabharata (Indian Art)

• European and Italian Renaissance influences, together with Indian decorative elements and a spiritual ethos
• Elaborately drawn and brightly colored suite articulates the great heroic epic
The epic Mahabharata, eulogized and worshiped by devotees worldwide, takes center stage in the artist's current creative repertoire. Tomassetti’s paintings, mostly in large size and bold colors, engage with the phenomenal Sanskrit epic of ancient India. As the title suggests it is a mahan (great) narration about bharatbaraga (descendants of Bharat/India), inscribed millennia ago by rishi Vyasadeva, around 400 BCE. Revered as a significant civilizational marker, the Mahabharata is the longest epic poem ever written. In its original, full form, it contains about 1.8 million words in over 100,000 shlokas (couplets) or 200,000 plus individual verse lines and long prose passages. Over the centuries, it has been revised and interpolated in attempts to unravel its historical or compositional layers and continues to be engagingly mysterious.

It traverses the struggle for sovereignty between two groups of cousins: the Kauravas and the Pandavas. The intrigues, struggles, and morals underlined in the spiritual narrative are replayed in amazing dramatic imagery in this body of work by artist Giampaolo Tomassetti, also known as JnananjanaDasa.