A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c20.s1.102

c20.s1.102

them, but as if circumscribed by a precise line, defined visibly from the ambient air. So the painters of the Middle Kingdom have never appreciated the real substance of things in modelling or relieving the surface; even at the finest epochs of their art they have remained incapable of representing solid and living forms, and after some twenty centuries of production are still where Italian painting was in the time of Giotto [1266-1366].'¹