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

CAMBODIA: THE KHMERS 415
background of the low relief. The compositions
are even more densely crowded than those of
Angkor Wat, and, although the narration is
extremely lively, the actual workmanship is
cruder and more summary.
This last monument of Khmer building, the
Bayon, is really not so much a work of architecture
as one of sculpture, with the towers, like
so many statues in the round, arranged as a great
mandala in stone. Here, as at Angkor Wat,
circumscribed panels are not sufficient for the
accommodation of the narrative reliefs: the
whole building and the outer wall of its
enclosure provide the background for the endless
defile of moving figures. The sculpture has,
The central tower was erected on the usual
cruciform plan. It was formerly entirely crushed
and hidden in the network of roots from a
banyan tree that grew from its summit, but has
now been freed of this entanglement to reveal a
tower culminating in a lotiform finial and in
profile suggesting the fourteenth-century spires
of Banteai Srei. The false doors of the little
building are carved with reliefs of the same
Lokesvara enshrined at the Bayon. The whole
has a lightness and delicacy of conception,
combined with an extremely complex icono-
347. Angkor Thom, Xeak Pean
in other words, overwhelmed the building,
unconfined by any space or limitation. This
development from a limited, almost classical,
conception of relief to an overflowing Baroque
manner exactly parallels the transition we have
already studied in the evolution from the technique
of Gupta relief sculpture to the dynamic
conception of the medium under the Pallavas
and later Hindu dynasties. It could be said,
perhaps, that the immensely complicated and
rich type of this late sculpture was exactly
appropriate to the complexity of Vajrayana
Buddhism.
Without the walls of Angkor Thorn is a small
dedication of the late thirteenth century, known
as Xeak Pean [346 and 347]. The single tower of
the sanctuary stands on a stepped lotiform
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plinth circled by two nagas in the centre of a
square basin of water. From this font radiate
four smaller tanks fed from the main reservoir
by gargoyles in the shape of the heads of a horse,
a lion, an elephant, and a human face. 25 Iconographically
this is a perfect reconstruction of the
concept of that magic lake in the Himalayas,
the waters of which pour out through the four
great rivers to solace men and the spirits in hell.
The tanks were intended for ritual ablution and
the whole complex was dedicated to the
merciful Bodhisattva Lokesvara.
graphical meaning, that is entirely typical of this
last
period of Khmer religious architecture.
One has the feeling, in studying this and all
the vast architectural dedications of these final
centuries of Khmer history, that these enterprises
were the result of the patronage of the
nobility and entrenched priesthood with the
collaboration of a privileged class of silpins and
the enforced assistance of what must have been
whole armies of slave labour. Once this entire
upper class and its patronage disappeared with