A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c13.s4.6

c13.s4.6

The cave temples at Bādāmī in the Bījāpur District, Bombay, exhibit among other decorations long sculptured story-telling friezes, extremely curious, but so clumsily executed as hardly to deserve the name of works of art. They date from the closing years of the sixth century.² From an artistic point of view the bracket figures of a god and goddess on the top of a pilaster, as shown in Plate XLII, are by far the best things at Bādāmī. They have the great merit of not being ugly, and are within measurable distance of being beautiful, but lack the vitality of the early Buddhist art, or even of the nearly contemporary Gupta art in Northern India.