A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c14.s2.91

c14.s2.91

The foregoing descriptions and illustrations will enable the reader to form a judgement concerning the aesthetic value of the Ajaṇṭā paintings, and I trust that nobody will be found to agree with the opinion expressed in Sir George Watt's book that they 'can hardly be classed among the fine arts'.² The pictures and decorative designs in the caves, when compared with Egyptian, Chinese, or other ancient paintings, which did not profess to show the relief effect of modern pictures, are fairly entitled to high rank as works of fine art. In judging them the critic should remember that the wall-paintings were executed on an enormous scale, some being more than 20 feet in diameter, and that they were intended to be looked at in the mass from a distance, and not in minute detail. Small reproductions on a page a few inches long cannot possibly give a just idea of the effects aimed at by the artists. Moreover, those artists were much concerned to tell sacred stories, and make their pictures serve for the edification of devout worshippers as instructive illustrations of the Buddhist Bible; whereas all the religious sentiment in the spectator on which they relied for sympathetic understanding is wanting in the modern European critic. Yet, in spite of the disadvantages inherent in small-scale reproductions and criticism by judges out of touch with the spirit of the artists, the paintings stand the unfair test wonderfully well, and excite respectful admiration as the production of painters capable of deep emotion, full of sympathy with the nature of men, women, children, animals, and plants, and endowed with masterly powers of execution.