The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

THE EARLY ANDHRA PERIOD 05
)A »' I it;
m
W~
T 111 35* J*
u '^'f^l'ir Lb.ralSPta
^gll^rmsaggs^gMgaw^£»qggBga||^U3
49. Safichi, west gate, Saddanta Jataka
P*
The
of the same story on the cross-bars of the southern
and western gateways of Safichi [49].
same method of continuous narration is employed,
so that the figure of the six-tusked elephant
(the future Buddha) is repeated no fewer than
four times. In the relief only the intrusion of the
figure of the hunter at the extreme right suggests
that this is more than a jungle idyll. The method
for suggesting space in these animal subjects is
exactly the same as that in dealing with human
figures in both sculpture and painting. The
forms in the foreground slightly overlap those
behind, which are placed above them in one or
more tiers to the top of the composition. As in
all periods of Indian art, we are struck with the
artist's complete assurance and mastery in rendering
the animals in literally dozens of poses,
every one of which is completely characteristic
of the species. The elephants at Ajanta and
Safichi are rendered with such consummate
knowledge of their specific articulation and gait
that it is difficult to think of a memory-image
intervening between the artist and the realization
of his design.
The setting, especially in those portions of
wall-painting dealing with the activity of human
figures, is entirely formalized, and exists only as
a background. There is already a completely
evolved convention whereby rocks are symbolized
by a series of block-like cubes, and mountains
are represented simply by duplication of
these same forms. These shapes, by their squareness
and hardness, serve to connote the idea of
rock or mountain without the necessity of any
really structural or textural description of the
form. This is the equivalent of the archaic method
of representing trees, whereby leaves of the
different species are attached to a mere ideograph
of the trunk-and-branch structure. Neither the
backgrounds of the Safichi reliefs nor those of
the early Ajanta wall-paintings are to be taken
as early landscapes in the development of a
landscape tradition, for the simple reason that
landscape never developed beyond this point in
any later period of Indian art. This stage of development
which remains unaltered approximates
that of European landscape in the work of
Giotto and his followers, in which the presence
of any necessary setting was indicated by the
most meagre details generally presented in the
same conceptual fashion. Actually, there was no
reason why a tradition of landscape painting
should develop in India at all. In no phase of
Indian philosophy or religion was there any
suggestion of the immanence of the deity in the
world of nature, nor any romantic attachment