Jain Miniature Paintings from Western India c12.4

c12.4

When we direct our attention towards Western Indian art, we do not try to isolate objects by purely aesthetic analysis. The association, for example, of a painting or an illustrated manuscript, and the association of the person brought into contact with it, are alone conducive to that state of mind from which one derives the sense of values. Among the associations of a painting may be the sacred subjects it deals with, the teacher to whom it is dedicated, the fame of the monastery to which it belonged, and the amount of money spent for its execution. The aesthete is to approach the painting in that religious frame of mind to which the incidents in the painting are as clear as day-light, and, together with other associations of the painting which he invokes, he is able to realise certain values, which, unhappily, a man, not knowing those associations, is unable to realise. As Prof. K. De. B. Codrington observes, "This confusion between the religious and the aesthetic, so evident to the analytic mind, is not a matter of failure to arrive at distinctions but of a definite refusal to admit of distinctions in which the sum of reactions that is human life, in which qualities are held to exist only as stupid preferences and intensity is alone satisfying."⁹⁷