A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c10.s3.19

c10.s3.19

The critic then proceeds to liken Gandhāran art to ‘cheap, modern Italian plaster work’, and to extol the later mediaeval sculpture and bronzes as exhibiting ‘quiet restrained dignity, calm conviction, and effacement of physical detail . . . the embodiment of a great national tradition, a synthesis of Eastern philosophy and religious art’. We are further told that the Brahmanical art of the eighth and ninth centuries expresses ‘the true Indian conception of divinity in a superhuman, spiritualized body’, or, as elsewhere phrased, ‘the idea of a purified, transcendental body formed by the practice of Dhyāna [meditation] and Yoga [ascetic restraint]’. So Dr. Coomaraswamy declares that ‘just as through all Indian schools of thought there runs like a golden thread the fundamental idealism of the Upanishads—the Vedānta—so in all Indian art there is a unity that underlies all its bewildering variety. This unifying principle is here also Idealism, and this must of necessity have been so, for the synthesis of Indian thought is one, not many’.³