Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c8.74

c8.74

The Amarâvati reliefs are considered by Fergusson and Professor Grünwedel to represent the culminating point in Indian sculpture. But this view can only be upheld by those who regard as decadence, instead of a new development on a higher plane of thought, the departure from European canons which here took place. Indian sculptors reached much higher imaginative flights and achieved much greater technical triumphs, but, after Amarâvati, they adopted an ideal of beauty totally different to that of Greece. They never attempted such a minute scientific investigation of the human structure as the sculptors of the Italian Renaissance made, because it would have been useless to them in perfecting an idealistic creation based upon imagination and artistic feeling, rather than upon scientific facts.