This essay analyses a unique instance in western India around 1800 in which artists attempted to visualize rhythm (tālamālā) by co-ordinating artistic with natural measures. While they looked to earlier templates of picturing music, such as of melody in rāgamālā, the artists sought forms of inspiration specific to rhythm. In particular, they turned to the workings of time, from a composition's tempo to a person's mental activity, to an animal's gait and to the moon's wax and wane. These intersecting temporal and rhythmic concepts, however, were abstract. To draw them into a visible realm, the painters relied on analogy as a method of comparison. They affiliated human-made rhythms in texts, pictures, and dance with those produced in the natural world, by the sun and moon, termites and snakes, the earth and rivers. By mobilizing their understanding of the environment, and people's place within it, the artists of these paintings managed to picture rhythm through a rare turn to ecology in the history of South Asian painting.

中文翻译：

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大约 1800 年，印度西部的图画韵律 (Tālamālā) 生态学

本文分析了 1800 年左右印度西部的一个独特例子，在这个例子中，艺术家试图通过协调艺术与自然措施来形象化节奏 ( tālamālā )。虽然他们参考了早期的音乐描绘模板，例如rāgamālā 中的旋律，艺术家们寻求特定于节奏的灵感形式。特别是，他们转向时间的运作，从作品的节奏到人的心理活动，到动物的步态，再到月亮的盈亏。然而，这些交叉的时间和节奏概念是抽象的。为了将它们绘制到可见的领域，画家们依靠类比作为比较的方法。他们将文字、图片和舞蹈中的人造节奏与自然界中产生的节奏相关联，包括太阳和月亮、白蚁和蛇、地球和河流。通过调动他们对环境和人在其中的位置的理解，这些画作的艺术家们设法通过南亚绘画史上罕见的生态转向来描绘节奏。