The Ancient and Medieval Architecture of India: A Study of Indo-Aryan Civilisation c18.38

c18.38

It is difficult to compare the magnificent sculpture of the Elephanta temple with any of the masterpieces of the West, for it belongs to a plane of æsthetic thought, not entirely peculiar to India, but one in which Indian artists were supreme. Greek art had its centaurs, fauns, and satyrs, and its pantheon of deified heroes, but left the profoundest mysteries of creation to the speculation of philosophers. Egyptian art, marvellous as it is, can only be regarded from a philosophic standpoint as glorified totemism. Indian philosophy, rising to a far higher intellectual plane, seems to take the monumental art of Egypt at the point where it stopped short, and to raise it, with an equivalent power of technical expression, to the loftiest heights ever yet attained by human thought. The mystics of India reconciled the aims of the artist and philosopher, which Greece and Italy were content to regard as belonging to different planes of thought.