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

THE PERIOD OF THE HINDU DYNASTIES
IG
order, composed of such motifs as rearing
chargers, trampling barbarians, and fantastic
much a sign of decadence in sixteenth-century
India as it is in Italy of the Baroque Period.
monsters. These gigantic pillars flowering into
immense brackets and entablatures were described
by the Portuguese visitor, Domingo
Paes, as 'Romanesque' and 'so well executed
that they appear as if made in Italy'."
The Yijayanagar style of sculpture persisted
in South India long after the fall of the City
of Victory. A notable example is the mandapa
of the enormous seventeenth-century temple at
Srirangam, where we see an entire colonnade of
rearing horsemen, each steed nearly nine feet
in height [249]. These charging cavaliers are in a
sense the final fantastic evolution from the
column supported by a rampant animal, which
begins in Pallava architecture. It here attains an
extravagance that has an inevitable suggestion of
the grotesque and fanciful quality of some European
medieval art. This motif, suggestive of St
George and the Dragon, was, according to
Percy Brown, inevitable for a civilization like
that of Yijayanagar, which in so many respects
parallels the chivalric period in the \Vest. 3: The
precision and sharpness with which the highly
polished chlorite stone is carved into the most
fantastic and baroque entanglements of figures
almost make it appear as though they were
wrought in cast steel, rather than stone. This
extraordinary dexterity in the working, or, perhaps
better, torturing, of the stone medium is as
12. MADURA
The final chapter of Dravidian architecture is
the building activity of the Xayak Dynasty of
kings who were established with their capital at
Madura in the seventeenth century. The temples
of this last Dravidian dynasty, exemplified by
the shrine at Tiruvannamalai and the Great
Temple at Madura [250], are distinguished first
of all by a great expansion of the temple precinct.
It is
veritably a city in itself [251]. This expansion
is due to the corresponding enlargement of
the Hindu ritual with specific reference to the
spiritual and temporal aspects of the deity. The
immense courtyard surrounding the central
shrine was designed to accommodate the crowds
who would gather to see the processions, when
the gods, like temporal rulers, would be taken
from their shrines and displayed to the multitude.
The temple grounds are now surrounded
by a high boundary wall with immense portals
surmounted by towers or gopuras located at the
cardinal points. These structures can best be
described as rectangular towers, concave in profile
and surmounted by hull-shaped roofs of the
vesara type. The gopuras in their immense
scale completely dwarf the central shrine within
the temple enclosure.