A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c15.s1.3

c15.s1.3

The wide extension of Indian languages, literature, and art from the second century of the Christian era thus demonstrated has been a surprise to the learned world, but the huge mass of material collected is so unmanageable that many years must elapse before 'the most interesting subject', as Dr. v. Le Coq calls it, of the relations between the early civilizations of India, Persia, China, and the Far East can be worked out so as to admit of firmly established conclusions. The accumulations brought back by Dr. Stein from his second expedition, known to be full of fascinating material, some of which I have seen, have been hardly touched as yet; and the, perhaps, equally bulky and valuable collections of the recent German and French explorers have been only imperfectly examined. At present, therefore, it is not possible to present in a few pages a satisfactory abstract of the new knowledge concerning the diffusion of Indian art and learning in the Chinese Turkistan countries. The paintings seem to be assignable mostly to the seventh or eighth centuries, and so help to fill up the gap in the story of Indian painting between Ajaṇṭā and Akbar. In this section no more can be attempted than a slight indication of the extent to which Indian schools of painting, modified by external influences, penetrated Turkistan, and, through it, the Far East.