The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c12.5

c12.5

To this summary description we are justified in adding a few observations of a technical kind. The painting is executed on a piece of coarse canvas, which had previously been covered with a coating, now partly vanished. The features (perhaps first sketched by the help of a pounce, dusted over a perforated pattern, as we know was often the custom of these image-makers) were drawn in ink, with great sureness of hand. If the sitting posture of the woman is unskilfully rendered, we shall remark, on the other hand, an interesting attempt to make the lozenges on the dress blend with the movement of the figure. Then colours, doubtless water-colours, have been applied in broad uniform tints. Here, it seems, golden yellow was confined to the seat and embroideries, while for the textures there is recourse to a series of reds, passing from the minium of the dress to the carmine of the veil : all are to be seen again on the various bands of the halo. Then a light wash in ink, encircling each feature, emphasizes the contours and hollows out the folds, whilst a few delicate touches here and there give the finishing stroke to the summary indication of the modelling. These are exactly the procedures which are found to recur in Sino-Japanese paintings, as also on Persian miniatures. We know that Oriental art has continued of set purpose to ignore the chiaroscuro. As to the date to be assigned to this picture, it is, provisionally, rather uncertain : for the archæology of Central Asia has to be drawn from the chaos of its materials, which for the most part are still unedited. However, thanks to the previous excavations of Sir Aurel Stein, we know that the *rabâb* with four keys, with which the child musician is playing, the flowers which the mouldings of the seat encircle, the « wave » or « cloud » motif of the embroidery were in use at Niya and at Rawak in southern Turkestan from the third century of our era (¹). But, on the other hand, according to the opinion of Dr. A. von Le Coq, the woman's costume, of a fashion already Uigur — not to mention the extreme obliquity of the eyes — would force us to descend at least as far as the beginning of the seventh.