The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c9.76

Language: English

v1.c9.76.1

Looking to these facts, the only conclusion that can be arrived at is, that however great the influence of religion on the plastic art, and great it certainly was at one time, it never was sufficient to destroy her separate existence, or even to control to any material extent her independent progress. When in alliance with religion, she served religion faithfully, by producing forms which it demanded, without any rcference to taste, but she never lost her yearning to advance to perfection, and that irrespective, and even in defiance, of the checks, which religion tried to impose on her. The yearning was strong enough even in the very early times of the ancient Egyptians, who had to lay down rules to prevent the statues of gods from being carved in other than the old conventional self-same way which their forefathers had approved duting the infancy of the art. The Hindus did the same; and yet the Egyptians and the Hindus failed to prevent the delineation of simple objects of nature and scenes of everyday life, so as to make the attempt at imitation more and mor faithful, and quite different from what the rules insisted upon. In the same way, when serving as a hand-maid to poetry, plastic [ 54 ] art, without forgetting her own true end, tried her best to give shape and form to poetical ideas and allegories, and did so without reference to the extent to which she conformed to natural laws.

v1.c9.76.2

Phidias, carving his celebrated figure of Minerva, thirty-nine feet high, had to put on her hand a winged figure of victory, and this could be done by making a full-grown and fully-dressed woman stand on the open palm of another, but the unnatural arrangement nevcr deterred him from accomplishing the task he had undertaken. In later times, Michael Angelo was called upon, by the nature of his subject, to introduce a monster's head with the horns of a ram, at the bottom of his unrivalled work of art, the *Last Judgment*. In the creation of Eve in Wells Cathedral, there is a composition in which a human figure is shown leaning on a bench, and from his back projects the upper half of a female figure, i. e., a monster with two heads, and two trunks supported on one pair of legs The object of the artist, it is true, was only to represent a particular instant in the production of a natural being, but the resulting figure is abnormal for all that.

v1.c9.76.3

Giovannida Bologna had to reduce to shape the allegory of Mercury or rumour depending on human tongue, and he designed a lithe, agile, nude male figure with a cap and wings on his head, leaping out of “expanding rays ( but very material and like a bundle of sticks ) issuing from the puffed cheeks, or rather mouth, of a zephyr, whose head only is exhibited”.²⁶ Again, Benvenuto Cellini, in his no less celebrated than magnificent group of Perseus and Andromeda, represents Perseus descending from mid-air to liberate the captive fair, and save her from the attack of a dragon issuing from flames, but, as travelling in mid-air, however natural to birds, is not quite consonant to human nature, the figure looks more like a man kicked down headlong from the top of a house than a hero descending for a fight with a monster. This offence against nature could not, however, be avoided. The story needed it, and the artist did what he could to preserve its substance. Similarly, when the Hindu artist had to give shape to the allegory of the birth of Brahmā, he designed, not a woman as supposed by Dr. Lübke, but an infant reclining on a leafy couch to typify the perfection of innocence and purity, and made it suck its toes, as an emblem of supreme happiness, and it is questionable if there is any other object in nature which can symbolise those attributes to greater perfection than an infant so occupied.

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The ornaments on the infant may be “foolish” according to European notions regarding such things, but there exist such excessive differences of opinion and so much local prejudice even among Europeans regarding the propriety and beauty of particular personal ornaments, that a very good plea, I fancy, may be urged in their favour, founded on the spirit of the age when the sculpture was first designed, and on the attachment of the people of this country to ornaments. The issue of an umbilical cord from the navel of such an infant, and the presence of a human figure,²⁷ Brahmā, on the top of it, however unpoetical, are, on the whole, not quite so revolting as the Eve of Wells Cathedral.