Jain Miniature Paintings from Western India c10.s1.11

c10.s1.11

The human figure in Western Indian school, in spite of the angularities in the treatment of the limbs, conserves the vestiges of the idealised form of the classical Indian beauty. The man still imitates the stature of a lion with his large chest and narrow waist, and the woman continues to imitate the torso in the form of an hour-glass with swelling breasts, narrow waist and well arched robust hips. Excessively large heads, measuring about one-fifth of the total height of the body, represented habitually in ‘profile perdue’, an attitude which rendered one eye less visible, is the vestige of a convention appearing at the end of the classical period. Careful of not hiding any detail of his model, the Western Indian artist represents this eye projecting into space beyond the facial line. In the palm-leaf period, this projecting tendency is less marked, but, in the paper period, it becomes a full fledged convention. The eyes are of two types, sometimes exceedingly long and narrow, and sometimes very small or very large. The pupils in the first case are represented by a circle and a point, and in the second case, by a black spot. The displacement of the pupils, that one may observe sometimes, denotes the desire of the artist to render the direction of the look. The eyebrows are very long and often reach the ears. The primitive character of these eyes stands in contrast with the treatment of the eyes in Ajaṇṭā frescoes, in which they are so beautifully rendered that one may regard them to be the outcome of some different tradition.³⁰