The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c15.3

c15.3

It is easy to understand, also, that a close restriction of this kind upon the highest imagination of the painter and sculptor is sufficient in itself to account for the comparative barrenness of Indo-Aryan fine art during the centuries when the Western branch of the same family tree was producing such wonderful fruit in the temples of ancient Greece. In later times it had the same sterilising effect upon the Muhammadan art of Europe and Asia. But for this restriction early Aryan sculpture and painting might have grown to the same height in India as it did in Greece; for the ideal gods of Hellas were of the same æsthetic growth as the early hymns of the Rig-Veda, sung by the Aryans in their Eastern home to the nature-gods they worshipped. Here, however, the artistic genius of the Western Aryans stopped short. They never were inspired with a more profound metaphysic than the Homeric gods; for Greece lost her freedom, and her artists became the servants of foreign patrons less intellectual than their own countrymen before that consummation was reached. It was left to their brother-artists in the East to proceed from the primitive nature-gods of the Rig-Veda to the inspired conceptions of the Upanishads; but there never was at any time that irreconcilable antagonism between the ideals of Greece and of India which modern classical scholasticism fondly imagines—because the inspiration both of Greece and of India lies beyond its æsthetic comprehension.