Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c19.37

c19.37

A good example of the idealistic treatment is afforded by the lotus. The lotus to Indian art and for the Indian mystic, is all that the rose was to Mediæval Europe. As English mediæval art is one long ‘Romaunt of the Rose,’ so Indian art is a romance of the many-petalled flower that is the throne of all divinities, and whose ideal form continually re-incarnates in every vessel and in every design. The simple lotus form represents the ideal form of all lotuses, as does the Tudor rose for all roses, it carries the emotion of all lotuses compressed into one abstraction. This is the secret of the constancy of art forms, that the ideal form they represent is eternal and immutable, a thought in the heart of Īśvara; that is why the trees at Barāhat and the trees in a Kandyan vihāra are expressed by the same formula. The impulse to the expression of emotion in art, is born of the sense of the unity of all life, the recognition of the many in the one. The representation of ideal forms, the reduction of various complex appearances to their simplest terms is an expression of the desire to see the one in the many.∗ There is here a great affinity between art and science; what natural law resuming the sequence of phenomena is for phenomena, ideal art is for the expression of emotion. Scientific drawing is concerned with the appearance of things as they seem to be in themselves; art with things as they really are within ourselves: in other words science is objective, art subjective. It is most important that their aims should not, as is now usually the case, be confused.