A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c15.s5.9

c15.s5.9

The technical and artistic qualities of the pictures are often obscured by the choice of repulsive subjects essentially unfit for artistic treatment. The hideous, grotesque, and horrible figments of Hindu imagination run wild cannot be made tolerable to the aesthetic sense by any cleverness or delicacy of execution. Hindu artists love to depict the ten incarnations of Vishnu, and no doubt edify their fellow believers, but no amount of edification to an orthodox Hindu can give the more grotesque and disgusting incarnations a right to figure as subjects for works of art. The fine volume, Or. 4769 in the British Museum, already referred to, is utterly spoiled from the aesthetic point of view by the subjects selected. The companion volume, Or. 4770, provides more agreeable representations of incidents from the *Mahābhārata*.