The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c9.197

Language: English

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**Respective Symmetry :** Symmetry may be treated under three different heads : 1st. —*Proportion*, *or the adaptation of the dimensions of the several parts of a thing to each other*. 2nd.—*Respective Symmetry*, *or such disposition of parts as to make the opposite sides equal to each other*. 3rd.—*Uniform Symmetry*, or that disposition of parts in which the same ordinance reigns throughout the whole. Regarding the first, some remarks have already been made at the beginning of the second chapter. The second, at first sight, may appear to be an unnatural formality, and therefore not an essential element of beauty. Nature does not arrange a landscape by two exactly similar halves, producing the same thing twice over ; why should then man do so in building a house ? The argument, however, is fallacious. In a beautiful landscape there *is* a balancing of its different parts so as to secure a considerable amount of symmetry, and artists study it carefully in grouping their subjects on canvas. A landscape, however, is not a single entity, but a collection of many objects ; and for the purposes of comparison with a house or other art creation, it is necessary that individual objects of nature should be selected, and not collections. If this be done it will be found that nature is particularly mindful of respective symmetry in the formation of animated beings.

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With the exception of some of the lowest forms of organization, every animal is externally a compound of two symmetrical halves. Those halves may be so artfully united at the mesian line as to produce one individual, whose double character does not become manifest until after careful study, still the double character Is nowhere wanting ; and what is more, the beauty of the form is in a great measure dependent upon it. Take away an eye or an arm from the finest figure, and its beauty is at once destroyed ; even the alteration by a hair's breadth of one side of the most exquisitely shaped mouth will induce an amount of deformity not easy to be defined. And what is true as regards the human form, is equally so in works of art, for imitation of nature forms the cardinal principle of beauty in art, and she advances towards perfection the more closely she copies nature ; to quote William Hazlitt : " the highest art is the imitation of the finest nature, or, in other words, of that which conveys the strongest sense of pleasure or power, of the sublime or beautiful ".⁸⁴ Doubtless in architecture, where the proportions are large, very slight differences are not so easily perceptible as in small objects, but the principle is not thereby in the least affected. In Greek architecture this attempt to copy nature by adhering closely to the laws of respective symmetry is most prominent.

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All its nobler specimens, if cut longitudinally along the middle from their fronts, would invariably produce two exactly similar halves. The same is the case in Orissa, and there is not a single exception. The front is a combination of two halves reduced to unity by the intervention of the door and the coat of arms, or the dripstone moulding, over it, even as the human form is united by the nose and the mouth ; and the two sides are exact counterparts of each other.` The sameness induced by this arrangement is never obtrusive nor offensive, as the two sides can never be seen in the same light at the same instant : stand where the observer will, he can behold only one or two sides, or one full side and small portions of two other sides, together scarcely equal to two full sides, and these in such different [ 75 ] lights, that they never produce two identically same pictures, while the sense of beauty produced by them is infinitely greater than any diversity in the forms of the sides could possibly produce. Indeed, if one were to conceive in his mind a peripteral temple with the columns of its left side different from those of its right, and feel the aesthetic effect of the arrangements, he will find no difficulty in appreciating the beauty of form which results from the similitude of the two sides of a house.

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This symmetry has been marred in many Orissan temples by subsequent additions even as in Greek edifices, but the original conception of the building nowhere tolerated any departure from perfect symmetry.