Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c11.s1.26

c11.s1.26

The Rūpāvaliya accounts of the lion (above), *nara simha* (overleaf), and horse (p. 90) should be carefully noted. For comparison I quote the description of a lion from an old Chinese canon. “With a form like that of the tiger, and with a colour tawny or sometimes blue, the lion looks like the Muku-inu, a shaggy dog. It has a huge head hard as bronze, a long tail, a forehead firm as iron, hook-like fangs, eyes like bended bows, and raised ears. The eyes flash like lightning, and the roar is like thunder.”* It is only in the light of descriptions that the aim of Eastern art in representing animal forms can be rightly understood. A tendency to naturalism is but rarely found, and it is rather the expression of a mental conception than a realistic picture that is aimed at. It is this point of view which has preserved Oriental art from such paltry and emasculated realism as the lions of Trafalgar Square. The artist’s lion need be like no lion on earth or in any Zoological Garden; he is not illustrating a work on natural history; it is rather for him to express through it the whole theory of his national existence and the strength of his individual and national idiosyncracy. It is this possibility which explains the vitality and expressiveness *Design and ornament* of the heraldic lions of England, the Barāhat lion, the lion of the Sinhalese craftsmen, and the lions of Hokusai’s ‘Daily Exorcisms,’ as compared with the absence of imagination in the handiwork of the English painter of domestic pets.