Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c32.27

c32.27

Certain conclusions drawn from the study of decorative art may also be referred to. With reference to the important ‘branch’ (‘Wellenranke’) motif, there is no reason to suppose it to be of Greek origin in Eastern art. It first appeared in Mediterranean art on certain Mykenean and Rhodian vases,† in a very simple form still found in Sinhalese art (Fig. 53) and not far removed from the most primitive possible forms of the kind. In the East, it appears first at Barāhat,‡ in a fully developed and quite un-Greek form, in the earliest Indian art preserved in lasting materials. As its first appearance in Mediterranean art is in late pre-historic times, a period of admitted Oriental influence on Greek art, the discovery of this motif cannot be credited to classic Greece; it is much more likely to be of Eastern origin, like the lotus flowers and buds, palmettes, spirals, etc., and the mythical animals§ which first appear in Mediterranean art at the same time, succeeding the geometrical forms which represented indigenous design. It is not likely that the ‘branch’ was invented about this time in more than one area. If it was invented in any one place, there is not sufficient evidence to show that this was not in Western Asia or Persia, whose art was the inheritor and continuator of Egyptian. There need, however, be no antagonism between the claims of East and West. The Mediterranean in early times was so much an integral part of the Oriental world, that it is easier and truer to explain resemblances by common origin, than by borrowings.* The reason of the resemblances may be sought in the existence of a “common Early Asiatic art, which has left its uttermost ripple marks alike on the shores of Hellas, the extreme west of Ireland, Etruria, Phœnicia, Egypt, India and China.”† The real home of this art may have been in Mesopotamia. It owed much to Egyptian influence. The sources of Mediterranean and Indian decorative art thus go back rather to a common origin, than are borrowed in either direction. It might still be argued that Indian art had borrowed from or been influenced by the later developments of Greek decorative art. As regards Barāhat and the decorative art generally, there is no evidence of this, and certainly there was no need for it. For Greek decorative art, compared with Egyptian or Early Indian, is unsympathetic in its treatment of vegetable form, “a hopeless divergence from any rational type,” as Flinders Petrie calls it.‡ The Greeks invented nothing dynamic in decorative art; the fact that the particular forms of their decorative art are still imitated is by no means evidence to the contrary; what they did do was to take conventionalized vegetable forms, and make them lifeless, changing lotus flowers into ‘honeysuckle’ and ‘acanthus,’ and lotus petals into ‘egg and dart.’