Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c31.4

c31.4

Early Indian art of the Aśokan period can be best studied in the Barāhat sculptures (200—150 B.C.). There are, as might be looked for, many motifs in Sinhalese art directly comparable with those characteristic at Barāhat; of these survivals, it will be worth while to notice some of the most important or conspicuous. One of these survivals, is the use of rosettes (lotus flowers), not as an essential part of a design, but to fill awkward spaces, and so preserve the flatness and evenness of the whole design, as, for example, in Pl. XVIII. Fig. 145 shows a lotus rosette similarly used at Barāhat. There are, moreover, significant resemblances and survivals in the forms of the lotus rosettes themselves. Amongst the lotus medallions of Barāhat which have parallels in mediæval Sinhalese work there are some in which the outer whorl of petals is replaced by cobra heads, all turned in one direction, right or left, around the centre (see Figs. 4 and 5, from Cunningham’s ‘Bharhut Stupa,’ Pl. XXXVIII.); in others the same forms can be recognized, but the cobra heads are so much more conventionalised that recognition would be difficult without the other type to guide us (see Fig. 6 from Cunningham’s Pl. XXXVIII.). The evolution from cobras’ heads to purely conventional forms had already taken place at Barāhat; and the more conventional type alone survives in Kandyan art (Fig. 147, also Fig. 34, III. and v.)