The Development of Hindu Iconography c8.27.4

c8.27.4

Hemādri quotes from one *Aparājita-pṛcchā* which may be the same as *Aparājita-vāstuśāstra* attributed to Viśvakarmā, one of the 18 authors mentioned above.¹ Extensive anthological works containing texts on architecture, iconography (dealing with the construction of images belonging not only to Brahmanical Hinduism but also to the rival creeds of Buddhism and Jainism), iconometry, and the allied arts of bronze-casting and painting were composed, and mention can be made of one such work, *viz.*, *Mānasāra*, referred to above, which has been already edited by P. K. Acharya. The name of another such work, though in a less comprehensive scale, can be alluded to here, and it has been edited in the Gaekwad Oriental Series; this is *Mānasollāsa*, which is itself a part of *Abhilaṣitārtha-cintāmaṇi*, a bigger anthology dealing with various topics, said to have been compiled by the Cālukya king Someśvaradeva who flourished in the 12th century A.D. King Bhoja of Dhara, who flourished a century earlier, is the reputed author of the Samarāṅgana-sūtradhara, a work mainly on architecture. Extensive collections of such and other allied texts have been edited by Ganapati Sastri in the Trivandrum Sanskrit Series, and they are entitled Mayamata of Mayamuni (already mentioned) and Śilparatna of Śrīkumāra which were originally written in Malayalam script.