The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c9.53

v1.c9.53

According to the author just quoted “the representation of *vegetable life* is excluded from the sphere of sculpture”: “Whenever consequently a vegetable creation is introduced into a work of” (Greek or Roman) “sculpture as an aid to the understanding of local and other relations, scuplture is obliged to give up all detailed delineation, and rather to produce a symbolic intimation than an imitation of actual reality”.¹⁸ The same, however, cannot be predicated of Orissan art. In it vegetable life forms just as much a subject of sculpture as any other object in nature, and, as a matter of fact, has been represented much more largely than animal, or human, life. This peculiarity may be due to the amount of artistic talent necessary for carving vegetable forms being small, or to the fact of such forms sorting best with the genius and taste of the people, but this is certain that the Uriyā artists depended very largely on the beauty of their vegetable forms for the success of their works, and introduced them as primary, and not accessory, ornaments in their architecture much more extensively than any other nation of antiquity. It is not to be denied that vegetable representations in stone must necessarily be to a certain extent wanting in “detailed delineation,” and also to some, but not to the full, extent implied by the words, “rather symbolic intimations than imitations of actual reality”. Circumstances render this unavoidable, and Uriyā works form no exception to the rule. There is, nevertheless, visible in the latter a considerable amount of success in faithfully representing nature. It should also be observed that “ornament has,” as justly and very pointedly put by Ruskin, “two entirely distinct sources of agreeableness: one, that of the [50] abstract beauty of its forms; ... the other, the sense of human labour and care spent upon it. How great this latter influence we may perhaps judge, by considering that there is not a cluster of weeds growing in any cranny of ruin which has not a beauty in all respects *nearly* equal, and, in some, immeasurably superior, to that of the most elaborate sculpture of its stones: and that all our interest in the carved work, our sense of its richness, though it is tenfold less rich than the knots of grass beside it; of its delicacy, though it is a thousandfold less delicate; of its admirableness, though a million-fold less admirable; results from our consciousness of its being the works of poor, clumsy, toilsome man. Its true delightfulness depends on our discovering in it the record of thoughts, and intents, and trials, and heartbreakings—of recoveries and joyfulness of success : all this can be traced by a practised eye ; but, granting it even obscure, it is presumed or understood ; and in that is the worth of the thing, just as much as of anything else we call precious"¹⁹ This extraneous or adventitious value in Orissan floral ornament deserves especial mention. Combined with a considerable amount of faithful representation and integrity there is an amount of luxuriance of decoration, of picturesque arrangement, and of sumptuous display of successful human labour governed by thorough intellectuality that claims a high meed of praise.