The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c11.15

c11.15

Henceforth nothing remains but to offer him our humble apology and to try to enter into his views. Naturally our observations of fact still hold good; but what we took for defects no longer appear to us anything but necessities logically imposed by the initial decision. It was in order to keep more closely to the horizontal sections of his segment of a sphere that he gave twenty angles to the parapets of the first four galleries and twelve to that of the fifth : if, in his desire to furnish his band of sculptors with plane surfaces, he had made these galleries simply quadrangular, they would have extended too far beyond the primordial inner circle. It is because a semi-circular profile does not mount like a pyramid, that the upper promenades, themselves circular, are necessarily lowered. This explains at once the contrast between the steepness of the first steps and the gentle slope of the last (cf. pl. XXXIII, 2) : not otherwise does one mount the outline of the upper section of a globe (¹). Neither is it the fault of anyone, but rather in the nature of things, if, having once reached the top of the rounded sides, one can no longer see the foot, just as from the base it is impossible to perceive the summit. If we likewise reflect that the architect of Boro-Budur was deprived of our favourite resource of colonnades, we shall understand why to the use of mouldings he has added that of antefixes, of niches and cupolas; and we shall no longer be astonished at the symmetrical multiplication