Indian Sculpture c5.s3.t2.38

c5.s3.t2.38

78), surpassing intellect, paired with the highest artistic accomplishment, synthesises the entire repertory of mature form with the possibilities of psychological differentiation. The slender sublimity of Śiva and Pārvatī has its contrast in the gravity of the attendants, true guardians and exponents of cave imagination. But not only are ethno-geographical differences transmuted into psychologically suggestive contrasts; the formal values are being connected psychologically and reflectively. The grading, or else the suddenness, in the staging of light and dark effects, by receding cuts into the rock, so as to echo the emotion of each figure, testify to an unfailing taste. The figure of Śiva, with an elegant pose of effortless command, is set against a flat wall. That of Pārvatī, on the other hand, shrinkingly reclines in front of an ever-deepening darkness, into which rushes the figure of a female attendant, the most fascinating amongst all the figures in this composition; deepest darkness looms behind Rāvaṇa, in his isolated cave. Depth and darkness are parcelled out according to the demands of psychological suggestiveness with which the artist invests each single figure. In this relief Indian art seems to enter upon possibilities which the future had to acknowledge, although the means of formulating them were then of a different order.