South Indian Bronzes: A Historical Survey of South Indian Sculpture with Iconographical Notes Based on Original Sources c10.7

c10.7

Indian and Greek Sculptures If we now turn for a moment to examine the nature of the artistic performance of these schools of craftsmen we find that in the best examples they have upheld qualities which, the world have agreed, constitute the greatest art. It is unquestionable that in the types which they represent and in the treatment of the figure which they show they are different and sometimes antagonistic to the examples of ancient classic sculpture in Europe. As may be seen that the only school of sculpture to which these Indian bronzes may be said to bear any affinity is the great school of Egyptian sculpture. Even then the monumental quality of some of the Egyptian Pharaohs and the intense realism of such portrait-statues as that of the Lady Naphret (Cairo Museum) are lacking in the best examples of the Saivaite apotheosised saints. On the other hand, as pictures of gods and super-human types, the studies of the Saivaite imagers, however mechanically they have been produced are infinitely superior to any religious art with which we are familiar in Greece, Italy or Egypt. The Greek conception of life for ever circumscribed the Greek sculptors' conception of form and has confined the Greek artist's vision of gods to a perfectly developed healthy human body. The "beautiful humanities" of the Greek Olympus, those finely handled "flesh-forms," are not in any real sense religious conceptions. Their gods are but grand and beautiful men. For Greek sculpture was after all the finest expression of Greek life—"a sensuous open-air, well-ordered life, largely spent between the gymnasium and the temple."