Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c19.35

c19.35

The most essential character of Kandyan painting, as of Kandyan design in general, is *Idealism* its idealism. This idealism belongs to all Indian art; but in Kandyan art it appears in almost an extreme form. Some of the *magul lakunu*, for example, are little more than hieroglyphics. But the idealism is very marked also in design and picture. Observe, for example, the trees on Pl. I. and XIV., 8; these are not portraits of particular trees, but abstractions, representing the artist’s generalised conception of all such trees. When I say ‘the artist,’ I do not refer to any individual, but imply the whole body of artists who together worked out the language long ago; and I say language because traditions and conventions are to the artist what words and metre are to the poet, and these no one man made. The idealism of Kandyan art is part of its inheritance from India; but as we have already observed, Kandyan art does not represent Indian art at its greatest or even at a very great period, but rather Indian art at the level of a great and beautiful scheme of peasant decoration. Kandyan art as we see it represents a tradition handed down from the earliest stratum of Indian art, modified and enriched by subsequent influences but in many ways primitive; just as the original manner of building in wood, and of making images in impermanent materials, survives in spite of the work in stone of Anurādhapura and Polonnaruva. Could the sculptors of Barāhat have come to life in eighteenth century Kandy, they would have found little that would have seemed strange or unfamiliar in the style or subject of the paintings on its vihāra walls. The sculptured trees at Barāhat differ only from those painted at Danagirigala in their more intense feeling for beauty and the deeper emotion which inspires them. This we should expect in work so much nearer the beginning of a great tradition.