A book of plates. L. T. P. Manjusri spent decades visiting Buddhist temples and copying what was on their walls, and this volume gathers the decorative designs he took from those murals: 159 plates of designs from 75 temples, from paintings of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. It is illustrated throughout, mostly in line drawings, with text in Sinhala, Tamil and English.
Manjusri began studying temple painting in the 1930s. Over the following decades he visited hundreds of temples, documenting and copying or tracing murals that were neglected and deteriorating. The plates here are drawn from that work. What the book offers is the decorative vocabulary itself, lifted off the wall and set on the page where it can be studied directly.
Manjusri was born at Alutgama and entered the Buddhist order as a novice at thirteen, studying at Mangala Pirivena in Beruwala. In 1950 he left the robes to work full time as an artist and writer, and he wrote extensively on Sri Lanka's classical art in both Sinhala and English. He received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1979.
The volume was published in Colombo by the Archaeological Society of Sri Lanka, which helped prepare it, with his family, for his 75th birthday. It runs to 234 pages with a frontispiece, and was reviewed by J. R. Marr in the Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies.
Because the content is visual, readers who do not read the text will still find most of the book open to them. It will suit designers and craftspeople looking for authentic Sri Lankan ornament to work from, art historians and students of Buddhist mural painting, and anyone interested in one artist's long effort to record temple paintings before they were lost.
- Author: L. T. P. Manjusri
- Publisher: Archaeological Society of Sri Lanka
- Published: 1977
- Pages: 234
- Language: Sinhala, Tamil and English
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