Ajanta: The Colour and Monochrome Reproductions of the Ajanta Frescoes Based on Photography v1.c4.38

v1.c4.38

To Italian painters of the Quattrocento, to Pollaiuolo and Signorelli, and, following them, the young Michelangelo, the naked body was a discovered romance. Their mental inheritance was totally different from that of the Greeks, for whom the perfect body had the sacredness of service severely devoted by discipline to the State. To them it was, if a symbol at all, a symbol of emancipation from the ascetic fear of, and disgust with, the body which the medieval centuries had implanted in the mind. But above all its beauty was strange and new.