Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c32.29

c32.29

Their decorative art was so different in spirit from Indian, that it could have given little to it; they regarded very little any aspect of nature except man himself; they had no conception of ideal art in relation to any but the human form; whereas the Indian love of nature, and sense of unity with it, led the Indian artist to cover surfaces with all sorts of idealized vegetable forms, as well as animal. The idealistic rendering of trees at Barāhat, reached a perfection which the Greeks never at any time attained. Even the figure sculpture at Barāhat has little affinity with Greek sculpture of the same date, but only a kinship§ with the archaic Greek sculpture of centuries earlier. And history shows at the same time how slight the intercourse with Greece at this time had been; Alexander’s influence on Indian culture must have been of the slightest: “within three years of his departure . . . all trace of his rule had disappeared. . . . India was not Hellenized. She continued to live her life of ‘splendid isolation,’ and soon forgot the passing of the Macedonian storm.”||