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

194 ROMANO-INDIAN ART
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Iranian. 6 This phase of Turkestan painting is
distinguished by its strident brilliance of
colouring: malachite green, orange, and lapislazuli
blue are the dominating hues in this
completely non-realistic palette [133]. Strangely
inarticulated figures have their faces and bodies
outlined with thick bands of orange shadow that
confer a certain plasticity" on these mannikinlike
forms without in any sense recording actual
effects of illumination; in the dark figure in our
illustration this shading is reinforced by white
highlights. Whereas this technique is presumably
Indian in origin, the round, placid faces,
the types of head-dresses and jewels are
reflexions of the art of Iran in the Sasanian
Period. An abstract flatness characterizes the
treatment of the costumes, in which the pattern
of the stuff is represented without consideration
for either the foreshortening of the folds or the
form of the body beneath [132]. Frequently, as
in the example illustrated [133], the figures
appear as though standing on tiptoe or levitated
in the air. This is the result of the ground having
become completely merged with the background,
the same abandonment of spatial
organization in favour of a completely spaceless
and decorative conventionalization of figures
It is worthy of note that paintings in both the
provincial Indian and Indo-Iranian techniques
may be found among the sixth-century wallpaintings
at Tun-huang in westernmost China.
In some of the Jataka scenes painted at Kizil the
wall is divided into many interlocking chevron
shapes; each one of these conventionalized
mountain silhouettes frames an isolated figure
or episode. This abstraction of what is essentially
a landscape background may be seen in a
further state of development in some of the
earliest wall-paintings at Tun-huang. The site
of Kizil also yielded a collection of highly polychromatic
sculpture, obviously derived from
the art of Gandhara. The perpetuation of this
Romanized Indian manner until such a late date
is probably to be explained by the use of moulds.
The architecture of the cave-temples at Kizil is
very simple, and cannot in any way be compared
in scale to the grandeur of the grotto-temples of
India, although certainly the idea of making
such rock-cut sanctuaries is of Indian origin,
most likely in imitation of the caves at Bamiyan.
The most common type of temple at Kizil is
either square or rectangular in plan, usually
with a small stupa in the centre of the chamber.
In a slightly more elaborate type a porch or
and setting that may be compared with the
vestibule
Byzantine mosaics of Saint Demetrius in
Saloniki. The strange combination of plastic
and patternized elements in the figures themselves
reminds us of the hieratic forms of
Byzantine mosaics of the First Golden Age, in
which the heads, set on substanceless bodies,
retain something of the solidly realistic qualities
of Roman art.
The Central Asian style that has just been
described is represented at Bamiyan by the
Bodhisattva in Group E. An even closer stylistic
approximation to the Bamiyan example may be
seen in a variant of the Indo-Iranian style in this
example from Kizil, in which the outlines of the
figure at the left are replaced by lines of an even
thickness and iron-hard quality. 7
precedes the sanctuary, an arrangement
also found at Bamiyan. Occasionally the
shrine is in the form of a single, long, narrow
chamber with a barrel vault cut out of the rock.
The so-called lantern roof, already seen at
Bamiyan, is also found at Kizil, and from there
found its way to the Thousand Buddha Caves at
Tun-huang.
The paintings from the eighth to the tenth
century, recovered from Bezeklik in the Turfan
oasis in north-eastern Turkestan, are almost
completely Chinese in style [134]. During these
centuries this territory was under the rule of the
Uighurs, a strong Turkish tribe, whose civilization
was largely Western in character. It is
evident from both the types and costumes
represented in the paintings of Turfan that this