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

4l8 CEYLON AND SOUTH-EAST ASIA
•
the expression of piety in European Baroque
painting, through the upward-rolling eyes and
gaping mouths of the saints by Guido Reni
and his followers.
The tendencies towards generalization and
formalized hardness persisting in the sculpture
of Angkor Wat reach a culmination in the style
of the Bayon of the late twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. Not only the giant heads of Lokesvara
[343], where scale might explain the lack of
feeling, but all sculpture of this period is
characterized by a mask-like fixity of expression
enhanced by the exaggeration of the Khmer
smile and an even more mechanical execution
[344]. There is no longer in the end any indication
of that striving for the rendering of the
vitalizing structure and essential nature of the
human body that marked the magnificent
efforts of the sixth and seventh centuries.
The heads from the period of the Bayon in
certain respects have a dreamy, soft quality
which is due to the abandonment of that precise
linear definition of details typical of the work of
the Early Classic Period. The individual
features do not stand out as separate parts
affixed to the block of the head, but melt into
this mass, so that to some degree there is a
return to the strong plastic conception of the
Funan Period. Many of the heads, however,
notably the collection of masks on the Bayon,
are so much alike that they might have been
cast from the same mould. There is a monotony
in this formula for expressing the peace of the
Buddhist soul which totally lacks the wonderful
feeling of individual creation and fierce striving
for the solution of plastic form as we see it in
the great masterpieces of the sixth and seventh
centuries.
.
Examples of Cambodian metal-work of all
periods are preserved in various collections in
Indo-China and the West. 26 They are reasonably
exact counterparts on a small scale of the
monumental sculpture of the different periods
of development and are of a very high order of
fineness of casting and craftsmanship. One of
the loveliest and at the same time most unusual
specimens, said to have come from the Bayon,
is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. It was probably part of a kind of flowering
candelabrum representing a wonder tree in
Indra's Paradise the fruit of which consisted of
beautiful maidens for the pleasure of the gods.
The fragment in our illustration 351 shows an
apsaras dancing on an open lotus pod, while
another celestial girl emerges from a bud at the
left. In few pieces of Khmer sculpture do we find
such a wonderful realization of the quality of
stylized rhythm that is at the basis of all Cambodian
design - in the dance, in architecture,
in sculpture. The lines of the ogee-shaped floral
enframement repeat the sinuous outline of the
arms and legs of the dancer. The gesture of her
upraised arms continues the wonderful suggestion
of pliant growth in the supporting vine.
Although badly corroded, enough of the original
surface is visible for us to see the great refinement
in modelling and in the rendering of the
chased details of the floral accessories. The little
figure of the dancer is so close to the representation
of apsaras on the Bayon itself that there is
no hesitation in dating this piece in the late
twelfth or early thirteenth century.
This final
period of Khmer civilization was
one of gigantic architectural programmes,
which in a way imposed mass production. One
has the feeling that the labour involved in the
erection of the vast complexes of the last century
of Angkor more than anything else exhausted
not only the Khmer genius, but the strength for
any kind of resistance against the Siamese, who
for long had been threatening the western
frontiers. The end of Angkor came in the
fifteenth century with a disastrous Siamese
campaign. Although the shadow ofa Cambodian
monarchy continued for some centuries at
Phnom Penh, the Khmer epic ends with this