Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c7.70

c7.70

The highest ideals of every national art have always centred themselves round the national conception of the Deity, and it is the Indian conception of divine beauty which gives the key to all Indian æsthetic thought, and shows most clearly the essential differences between Eastern ideals and Western. The Greek, when he attempted to realise a divine ideal, took for his model a type of physical beauty, such as the athlete or the warrior. The Indian always takes the *Yogi*, the religious devotee who, by a system of spiritual exercises, enjoined by the Yoga school of philosophy, aims at freeing himself from worldly attachments and placing himself in communion with the Universal Self, the Supreme Soul—Brahman. Yet it is not the physical form of the Yogi which he endeavours to represent. His ideal is not made of common human clay. He only strives to materialise the subtler, purer Soul within.