A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c8.77

c8.77

Hardly anything remains standing of the larger temples, which must have been erected in many places during the rule of the great Gupta monarchs of the fourth and fifth centuries. The surviving buildings of that time are chiefly tiny shrines resembling the cave temples, and situated in out-of-the-way places. Cunningham treated those little edifices as examples of the 'Gupta style', and enumerated seven characteristics of that style, namely, (1) flat roofs, without steeples of any kind; (2) prolongation of the head of the doorway beyond the jambs; (3) statues of the personified Ganges and Jumna guarding the entrance; (4) pillars with a massive square capital, surmounted by two lions back to back, often with a tree between them; (5) bosses over the capitals, and peculiar friezes; (6) continuation of the architrave of the portico as a moulding round the building; and (7) deviation of the plan from the cardinal points. A characteristic example exists at Tigawā in the Jabalpur District, Central Provinces, but is hardly worth illustration.¹