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

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elaborately carved barge-boards and gables.
One of the most distinctive features of these
modern buildings is the projecting 'ox-horns'
on the gables. These are actually stylized representations
ofnagas. The decorative accessories
of these later structures are a hodge-podge of
borrowings from ancient Siamese and modern
Chinese sources. Although often verging on the
garish in the variety of materials and colours
employed, they are extremely pleasing in the
contrast between the white walls and columns
and the richly inlaid gables and tiled roofs. The
overlapping or telescoped roofs that are such
an inevitable part of these structures recall the
galleries of Angkor Wat, but in actuality both
are ultimately descended from the employment
of this technique in early wooden buildings
both in Cambodia and Siam.
Siamese painting, including work in lacquer,
survives only from the Ayudhya Period mainly
in illuminated manuscripts, with occasional
wall-paintings and temple banners. The archaistic
style, exactly paralleling the final development
in sculpture, reveals only the exhaustion
of a highly mannered and ornate decorative
tradition, in which the individual forms are
reduced to the same patternized emptiness that
369. Gold crown from Chiengmai.
Wat Cetiya Luang, Siam
characterizes the Buddhist statues of the seventeenth
century and later.
The end of art in Siam is decadence ; whereas
'art and craft were once indivisible, the craft
now predominates'. 7
The traditional formulae,
exhausted by meaningless simplification, are
reduced to an unhappy combination of archaism
and sentimentality, just as the panels of the
Sienese painters of the early fifteenth century
reveal only an empty and decorative repetition
of the work of Duccio and Simone Martini.
The surviving examples of Siamese metalwork
from the early periods are most of them in the
form of votive objects recovered at various
sacred sites. An example is the jewel-studded
golden crown of the sixteenth century from
Chiengmai [369], an object probably presented
by royalty as a token to the Buddha and more
like a metal wig comprised of snail-shell curls