A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c14.s2.98

c14.s2.98

In support of his comparison with the performance of the early Italians, he aptly cites the fragment of a fresco with heads of nuns by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, executed in the fourteenth century, and now in the Sienese Room of the National Gallery, as being 'singularly like the Ajaṇṭā work in colour, execution, and treatment; the forms being drawn with a delicate brown outline, and the flesh-tints and drapery flatly put in with very little modelling'. The obvious comparison with ancient Italian art was also made by Mr. Fergusson, who considered the Ajaṇṭā paintings to be better than anything in Europe before the time of Orcagna in the fourteenth, or even Fiesole (Fra Angelico) in the fifteenth century. Similarly Mr. Havell, another trained artist, who selects the charming Mother and Child in Cave XVII (Griffiths, Fig. 76) as the most attractive specimen of Ajaṇṭā art, finds in the frescoes 'the same intense love of nature and spiritual devotion as are evident in the sculptures of Borobodūr', and compares the 'exquisite sentiment' of the picture selected with the wonderful Madonnas of Giovanni Bellini'.²