Images of Thanjavur paintings curated by the Late Shri Vijayanath Shenoy from the Tanjore Art Gallery at Hasta Shilpa Village, Manipal, Karnataka. The paintings depict mythological themes popular during the Nayaka and Maratha reign in the Tanjore region, and a major source of inspiration for this painting tradition. These paintings mark a major cultural transformation, as they started serving the purpose of icons in temples and houses. The gods who would earlier be invited to reside in temples through the ceremony of ‘murti sthapana’ (consecration of idols with appropriate rituals) now came to people's homes in the form of these paintings.
Late Shri Vijaynath Shenoy
Vijayanath Shenoy (1934–2017), a retired banker who converted his own home into an ethnographic museum, was the founder of Hasta Shilpa Heritage Village in Manipal, Karnataka. He was an art lover, and the idea behind founding this open-air museum was to restore and conserve the nation's cultural wealth in the form of traditional buildings, and objects of art, craft and other artefacts of aesthetic interest.
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