Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c32.25

c32.25

One interesting point of distinction between the technical methods of East and West is found in the Indian canons of proportion. The ‘face,’ and not the ‘head,’ is taken as the standard of measurement. The generally recognized standard for a human or divine figure is a height of nine ‘faces’ (equivalent to about 7½ ‘heads’ in European terminology). The whole artistic canon (Silpa Śāstra) of India appears to be independent of Western influence, both in its insistence upon the importance of meditation, in the manner of describing the details of the proportions, and in the technical methods of pointing (use of a horizontal framework with suspended plumb lines, as a pointing machine).