Vastu-shastra (Vol. I: Hindu Science of Architecture; Vol. II: Hindu Canons of Iconography and Painting) v2.c76.132

v2.c76.132

Now as regards the third angle, here too there are a good many clues in ancient Indian literary and artistic monuments. Painting, being a fine art, is ornament of a town, hobby of townsmen and a civilized trait of citizenship. That every cultured man had in his house a drawing board and a vessel for holding brushes and other requisites of painting, is corroborated by the Vātsāyana's Kāmsūtra. Science of paints and its art for cultivation were prevalent in the earliest of Buddist period. The King Prasenajit, Kramrisch observes, could boast of a picture gallery where the Bhikkhunīs were forbidden to go. Similar are many literary evidences corroborating this fact. Kramrisch observes: "From the great Hall built by the Bodhisat according to the Mahā Ummagga-Jātaka—painted with beautiful pictures and the subterranean palace of the same Jātak, with its stucco-coated walls, bearing paintings of the splendour of Sakka, the Zones of Mt. Sumeru, the sea, and the ocean, the four continents, the Himavat, the lake Anotatta, the vermilion mountain, the sun and the moon, the heaven of the great kings with the six heavens of sense and their divisions, to the picture gallery (citrāgāra) in the royal pleasure-grove of Pasenajit, the king of Kośala, where many people used to go, amongst them the Bhikkhunīs, who were forbidden to do so—to those many portraits and landscapes painted by artists of royal and servants class alike, as mentioned in the Ratnāvalī Raghuvaṁśa, Śakuntalā and Uttara-Rāma-charita—we see an unfading delight taken in the magic and the sensuousness of painting".