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

84 THE EARLY CLASSIC PERIODS
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story are in a way quite effectively isolated from
one another, so that the observer is persuaded
to regard them as separate happenings. The
details of setting consist of only three conceptually
represented trees in the upper part of the
medallion and five does at the left that represent
the herd of the golden stag. There is only the
most rudimentary suggestion of space within
the relief created by very timid overlappings
and the placing of figures one above the other.
The result of this treatment is the creation of a
strangely timeless and spaceless ambient that is
not without its appropriateness for the narration
of heroic myth.
The representation of the Jataka stories and
scenes from the life of the Buddha could again
be described as conceptual, since the figures of
men and animals are invariably represented
from that point of view which the memory
recognizes as most typical of a thing or a species.
As we have seen, the method of continuous
narration is universally employed; that is, a
number of successive episodes from the same
story are represented within the confines of the
same panel. In this archaic method, to suggest
the fluctuations of happening, the chronological
associations which are stored all together at one
time in one picture in the artist's mind are
represented simultaneously as they exist in the
mind of the craftsman. The method of continuous
narration, the employment of vertical
projection and conceptual form, should be
regarded partly as naive and due to the inability
to resolve representational problems, and partly
as the result of the traditional craftsman's
realization that events from the world of myth,
apart from time and space, cannot properly be
represented in any other way. In the archaic art
of India, as in the traditional art of all ancient
civilizations, the artist represents what his mind
knows to be true, rather than what his eye
reports. In the magic world of the heroic legend,
a world of no time and no place, where anything
can happen as it does in dreams, there is no
need for scientific accuracy. Since, in the world
of the gods, space and time are one, it would be
impossible to think of anything corresponding
to the Western Classic world's interest in the
fugitive moment. The problem of the sculptor
of the decorations of the stupa railing was to
present the worshipper with the most direct
and easily readable symbols of the Buddhist
legends, a problem in which the extreme simplification
of the theme was conditioned in part, at
least, by the shape and dimensions of the
medallions. The necessity for simplification
imposed the isolation of the individual elements
of the composition like so many parts of a
pattern against the plain background. For all its
effectiveness, technical as well as iconographical,
one cannot overlook the fact that this method of
carving must have been the result of the workman's
unfamiliarity with the stone medium.
Another set of carvings - perhaps the very
earliest monuments of Sunga art - that clearly
demonstrates the painful emergence of a native
tradition of stone-carving is the ornamentation
of the second stupa, generally designated 'Stupa
2', at Sarichi in Bhopal State. This relic mound,
located to the west and below the Great Stupa
of the Early Andhra Period, was a foundation of
the Sunga rulers of Malwa in the last quarter
of the second century B.C. When it was opened
in the nineteenth century, the dome was found
to contain relics of two disciples of the Buddha,
together with remains of ten Buddhist saints
who participated in the Buddhist council convened
by the Emperor Asoka in 250 B.C. The
stupa proper is of the simplest type, consisting
of a circular base supporting the actual hemispherical
cupola; around this was constructed a
sandstone railing with its gateways disposed
like the claws of a swastika attached to the
circular plan of the enclosure. The sculptural
decoration consists of medallions carved on the
uprights of the interior and more complicated
rectangular panels emphasizing the posts of the
actual entrances. The subjects of the medallions