Raga Mala is an unprecedented look at Ravi Shankar, master of the sitar and one of the most enduring and inspriational performers of the twentieth century.

"The Art of Music takes the relationship between two of the more prominent and oft-intersecting branches of artistic creation as its subject. The liaison between music and the visual arts has inspired countless generations of artists. The two have had manifold complex interactions across all periods of history, in Western and non-Western contexts alike, yet their intersection has only become a rich vein for research by art historians and musicologists in the last thirty years. By tracing these relationships, new insights into the affinities of the arts become clear"--

Ragamala, literally a garland of ragas, is a unique form of Indian miniature painting developed by combining a variety of sources including musical codes and accomanying poetry to indicate the time of day, or season, in which the melody should be performed. These miniatures were executed in India from 1400 and by the late 1700s had died out. This new book, and the exhibition it accompanies, presents a fine and rare collection of twenty-four ragamala from the collection of Claudio Moscatelli, a painting conservator based in London. Over fifteen years he has amassed one of the finest collections of ragamala in Britain comprising three different groups, Pahari, Rajasthani and Deccani, displaying regional variations.