A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c14.3

c14.3

The ancient literature of India and Ceylon contains many references to pictorial art, the earliest, perhaps, being those in books of the Pāli Buddhist canon dating from some three or four centuries before the Christian era. Several passages in those books tell of pleasure-houses belonging to the kings of Magadha and Kosala in Northern India as being adorned with painted figures and decorative patterns, presumably similar to the earliest known frescoes in Orissa and at Ajaṇṭā.¹ Painted halls are also mentioned in the *Rāmāyaṇa*, a Brahmanical epic of uncertain but early date; and allusions to portraits are frequent in the dramas of Kālidāsa and his successors from the fifth to the eighth century after Christ. The Ceylonese chronicle, the *Mahāvaṃsa*, composed probably in the fifth century, tells of the mural paintings decorating the relic-chamber of the Ruwanweli *dāgaba* constructed by King Duttha-gāmini about B.C. 150. The testimony of native writers is confirmed by that of the Chinese pilgrims in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries, who notice several examples of celebrated Buddhist pictures; and by Tāranāth, the Tibetan historian of Buddhism, who, when writing at the beginning of the seventeenth century, ascribes the most ancient pictures to the gods, and declares that they were so marvellous as to bewilder beholders by their realism.¹