III. PAINTING
Prehistoric—The frescoes of Ajanta—Rajput miniatures—The Mogul school—The painters—The theorists
A provincial is a man who judges the world in terms of his parish, and considers all unfamiliar things barbarous. It is told of the Emperor Jehangir—a man of taste and learning in the arts—that when he was shown a European painting he rejected it summarily; being “in oyle, he liked it not.”15 It is pleasant to know that even an emperor can be a provincial, and that it was as difficult for Jehangir to enjoy the oil-painting of Europe as it is for us to appreciate the minatures of India.
It is clear, from the drawings, in red pigment, of animals and a rhinoceros hunt in the prehistoric caves of Singanpur and Mirzapur, that Indian painting has had a history of many thousands of years. Palettes with ground colors ready for use abound among the remains of neolithic India.16Great gaps occur in the history of the art, because most of the early work was ruined by the climate, and much of the remainder was destroyed by Moslem “idol-breakers” from Mahmud to Aurangzeb.17 The Vinaya Pitaka (ca. 300 B.C.) refers to King Pasenada’s palace as containing picture galleries, and Fa-Hien and Yuan Chwang describe many buildings as famous for the excellence of their murals;18 but no trace of these structures remains. One of the oldest frescoes in Tibet shows an artist painting a portrait of Buddha;19 the later artist took it for granted that painting was an established art in Buddha’s days.
The earliest dateable Indian painting is a group of Buddhist frescoes (ca. 100 B.C.) found on the walls of a cave in Sirguya, in the Central Provinces. From that time on the art of fresco painting—that is, painting upon freshly laid plaster before it dries—progressed step by step until on the walls of the caves at Ajanta* it reached a perfection never excelled even by Giotto or Leonardo. These temples were carved out of the rocky face of a mountain-side at various periods from the first to the seventh century A.D. For centuries they were lost to history and human memory after the decay of Buddhism; the jungle grew about them and almost buried them; bats, snakes and other beasts made their home there, and a thousand varieties of birds and insects fouled the paintings with their waste. In 1819 Europeans stumbled into the ruins, and were amazed to find on the walls frescoes that are now ranked among the masterpieces of the world’s art.20
The temples have been called caves, for in most cases they are cut into the mountains. Cave No. XVI, for example, is an excavation sixty-five feet each way, upheld by twenty pillars; alongside the central hall are sixteen monastic cells; a porticoed veranda adorns the front, and a sanctuary hides in the back. Every wall is covered with frescoes. In 1879 sixteen of the twenty-nine temples contained paintings; by 1910 the frescoes in ten of these sixteen had been destroyed by exposure, and those in the remaining six had been mutilated by inept attempts at restoration.21 Once these frescoes were brilliant with red, green, blue and purple pigments; nothing survives of the colors now except low-toned and blackened surfaces. Some of the paintings, thus obscured by time and ignorance, seem coarse and grotesque to us, who cannot read the Buddhist legends with Buddhist hearts; others are at once powerful and graceful, a revelation of the skill of craftsmen whose names perished long before their work.
Despite these depredations, Cave I is still rich in masterpieces. Here, on one wall, is (probably) a Bodhisattwa—a Buddhist saint entitled to Nirvana, but choosing, instead, repeated rebirths in order to minister to men. Never has the sadness of understanding been more profoundly portrayed;22 one wonders which is finer or deeper—this, or Leonardo’s kindred study of the head of Christ.* On another wall of the same temple is a study of Shiva and his wife Parvati, dressed in jewelry.23 Nearby is a painting of four deer, tender with the Buddhist sympathy for animals; and on the ceiling is a design still alive with delicately drawn flowers and fowl.24 On a wall of Cave XVII is a graceful representation, now half destroyed, of the god Vishnu, with his retinue, flying down from heaven to attend some event in the life of Buddha;25 on another wall is a schematic but colorful portrait of a princess and her maids.26 Mingled with these chef-d’æuvres are crowded frescoes of apparently poor workmanship, describing the youth, flight and temptation of Buddha.27
But we cannot judge these works in their original form from what survives of them today; and doubtless there are clues to their appreciation that are not revealed to alien souls. Even the Occidental, however, can admire the nobility of the subject, the majestic scope of the plan, the unity of the composition, the clearness, simplicity and decisiveness of the line, and—among many details—the astonishing perfection of that bane of all artists, the hands. Imagination can picture the artist-priests† who prayed in these cells and perhaps painted these walls and ceilings with fond and pious art while Europe lay buried in her early-medieval darkness. Here at Ajanta religious devotion fused architecture, sculpture and painting into a happy unity, and produced one of the sovereign monuments of Hindu art.
When their temples were closed or destroyed by Huns and Moslems the Hindus turned their pictorial skill to lesser forms. Among the Rajputs a school of painters arose who recorded in delicate miniatures the episodes of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, and the heroic deeds of the Rajputana chieftains; often they were mere outlines, but always they were instinct with life, and perfect in design. There is, in the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston, a charming example of this style, symbolizing one of the ragas of music by means of graceful women, a stately tower, and a lowering sky.29 Another example, in the Art Institute of Detroit, represents with unique delicacy a scene from the Gita-Govinda.30 The human figures in these and other Hindu paintings were rarely drawn from models; the artist visualized them out of imagination and memory. He painted, usually, in brilliant tempera upon a paper surface; he used fine brushes made from the most delicate hairs that he could get from the squirrel, the camel, the goat or the mongoose;31 and he achieved a refinement of line and decoration that delight even the foreign and inexpert eye.
Similar work was done in other parts of India, especially in the state of Kangra.32 Another variety of the same genre developed under the Moguls at Delhi. Rising out of Persian calligraphy and the art of illuminating manuscripts, this style grew into a form of aristocratic portraiture corresponding, in its refinement and exclusivesness, to the chamber music that flourished at the court. Like the Rajput school, the Mogul painters strove for delicacy of line, sometimes using a brush made from a single hair; and they, too, rivaled one another in the skilful portrayal of the hand. But they put more color into their drawings, and less mysticism; they seldom touched religion or mythology; they confined themselves to the earth, and were as realistic as caution would permit. Their subjects were living men and women of imperial position and temper, not noted for humility; one after another these dignitaries sat for their portraits, until the picture galleries of that royal dilettante, Jehangir, were filled with the likenesses of every important ruler or courtier since the coming of Akbar to the throne. Akbar was the first of his dynasty to encourage painting; at the end of his reign, if we may believe Abu-1 Fazl, there were a hundred masters in Delhi, and a thousand amateurs.33 Jehangir’s intelligent patronage developed the art, and widened its field from portraiture to the representation of hunting scenes and other natural backgrounds for the human figure—which still dominated the picture; one minature shows the Emperor himself almost in the claws of a lion that has clambered upon the rump of the imperial elephant and is reaching for the royal flesh, while an attendant realistically takes to his heels.34 Under Shah Jehan the art reached its height, and began to decline; as in the case of Japanese prints, the widened popularity of the form gave it at once a wider audience and a less exacting taste.35 Aurangzeb, by restoring the strict rule of Islam against images, completed the decay.
Through the intelligent beneficence of the Mogul kings Indian painters enjoyed at Delhi a prosperity that they had not known for many centuries. The guild of painters, which had kept itself alive from Buddhist times, renewed its youth, and some of its members escaped from the anonymity with which time’s forgetfulness, and Hindu negligence of the individual, cover most Indian art. Out of seventeen artists considered preeminent in Akbar’s reign, thirteen were Hindus.36 The most favored of all the painters at the great Mogul’s court was Dasvanth, whose lowly origin as the son of a palanquin-bearer aroused no prejudice against him in the eyes of the Emperor. The youth was eccentric, and insisted on drawing pictures wherever he went, and on whatever surface he found at hand. Akbar recognized his genius, and had his own drawing-master teach him. The boy became in time the greatest master of his age; but at the height of his fame he stabbed himself to death.37
Wherever men do things, other men will arise who will explain to them how things should be done. The Hindus, whose philosophy did not exalt logic, loved logic none the less, and delighted to formulate in the strictest and most rational rules the subtle procedure of every art. So, early in our era, the Sandanga, or “Six Limbs of Indian Painting,” laid down, like a later and perhaps imitative Chinese,* six canons of excellence in pictorial art: (i) the knowledge of appearances; (2) correct perception, measure and structure; (3) the action of feelings on forms; (4) the infusion of grace, or artistic representation; (5) similitude; and (6) an artistic use of brush and colors. Later an elaborate esthetic code appeared, the Shilpa-shastra, in which the rules and traditions of each art were formulated for all time. The artist, we are told, should be learned in the Vedas, “delighting in the worship of God, faithful to his wife, avoiding strange women, and piously acquiring a knowledge of various sciences.”38
We shall be helped in understanding Oriental painting if we remember, first, that it seeks to represent not things but feelings, and not to represent but to suggest; that it depends not on color but on line; that it aims to create esthetic and religious emotion rather than to reproduce reality; that it is interested in the “soul” or “spirit” of men and things, rather than in their material forms. Try as we will, however, we shall hardly find in Indian painting the technical development, or range and depth of significance, that characterize the pictorial art of China and Japan. Certain Hindus explain this very fancifully: painting decayed among them, they tell us, because it was too easy, it was not a sufficiently laborious gift to offer to the gods.39 Perhaps pictures, so mortally frail and transitory, did not quite satisfy the craving of the Hindu for some lasting embodiment of his chosen deity. Slowly, as Buddhism reconciled itself to imagery, and the Brahmanic shrines increased and multiplied, painting was replaced by statuary, color and line by lasting stone.