Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c3.5

c3.5

If we would understand the significance and the history of the arts and crafts in India, it will be needful to begin with such survivals of them as we can study readily, and work back from these to earlier times. Hence, even from a wider point of view, I make no apology for writing a large book about a time when the traditions of fine art were stereotyped, and even the traditions of the crafts intensely formalised and rigid. Such an art is, as it were, an outlier, left by long continued denudation, in extent severely limited, yet evidence unmistakeable of a former continuity which it helps us to understand. Even so considered, the intrinsic value of the art is great; the capacity for certain types of designing survives even to this day amongst a few craftsmen almost perfectly developed; and whatever limitations even late Sinhalese art possessed, it is at least immeasurably superior to anything produced by any would-be-modern Sinhalese artists of the present day. An eighteenth century jataka painting is as much superior to a modern Low-country book illustration, as a Kandyan jewel is to a modern imitation of a design borrowed from a Birmingham catalogue, or a Kandyan temple to a modern structure such as that described on p. 132.