Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c7.209

c7.209

Hindu philosophy thus clearly recognises the impossibility of human art realising the form of God. It therefore creates in Indian sculpture and painting an allegorical representation of those milder, humanised, but still superhuman, divine appearances which mortal eyes can bear to look upon. A figure with three heads and four, six, or eight arms seems to a European a barbaric conception, though it is not less physiologically impossible than the wings growing from the human scapula in the European representation of angels—an idea probably borrowed from the East. But it is altogether foolish to condemn such artistic allegories *a priori*, because they do not conform to the canons of the classic art of Europe. All art is suggestion and convention, and if Indian artists, by their conventions, can suggest divine attributes to Indian people with Indian culture, they have fulfilled the purpose of their art. It is the unfortunate tendency of modern European education to reduce art to mere rules of logic or technique, anatomy or perspective, style or fashion, so that the creative faculty, on which the vitality of art depends, is drowned in empty formularies of no intellectual, moral, or æsthetic value.