Indian Art: A History of Indian Art from the Earliest Times up to the Third Century A.D. c16.11

c16.11

The clay-figurines in the Gupta period looked charming being coloured and treated with painted lines to indicate striped and checkered drapery, black hair, eyebrows, etc. For the period c. 400-700 A. D. more numerous, better and bigger specimens of clay-figurines are available, as well a richness of literary references to them. Bāṇabhaṭṭa speaks of the modeller as *lepyakāra* and *pustakṛt*. Buddhaghosha refers to clay platic art as *potthaka-rūpa*, to ivory as *dānta-rūpa* and to metal as *loha-rūpa*. Rājaśekhara (A. D. ninth century) describes the modeller taking his seat with a painter (*chitra-lepya-kṛtaḥ*), a laipdarist, a goldsmith and other artists in the western wing of the king's *Sabhā*¹. Harisheṇa's reference (tenth century A. D.) to an expert modeller executing at the request of a king a colossal stucco image² reminds of the large-sized stucco images similar to those surviving in the ruins of the Nālandā monastery. The terracotta and brick monuments of the Gupta and post-Gupta periods like the brick temples at Bhitargāon (Kanpur district) and Sīrpur (Raipur district) and the Stūpas at Pahārpur and Mahāsthān (Bogra district) bespeak the architectural heights this art had once attained. The beautiful terracotta plaques from the frieze of the terraced Śiva temple at Ahichchhatrā (Bareli district) and the Buddhist Stūpa at Mīrpurkhās, Sind, likewise illustrate rich documentation of religious subjects through the medium of terracotta art. The tradition of producing moulded plaques of big size continued later for about a thousand years up to the eighteenth century as seen in the brick temples of Kashmir and Bengal.