Resumo de Indian Painting: The Great Mural Tradition

Mira Seth's Indian Painting: The Great Mural Tradition marks a refreshing change. Here is a vast compendium of the subcontinent's wall Painting styles, which acknowledges the diversity of sources as well as the tactical inventiveness that inform the accomplishments of Ajanta and Alchi, Padmanabhapuram and Kotah, Leepakshi and Agra. The author does not merely generate a mailing list of the great and glorious; rather, she gathers her protagonists? anonymous Buddhist monk and favoured atelier painter, royal patron and contemplative abbot, connoisseur and artisan? into larger contexts of political transformation, inter-cultural communication, iconographic development and the availability of materials. Evolution Crucially, Seth situates the evolution of Indian art, and especially its wall painting tradition, within a circuit of migrations, cross-pollinations and dialogues extending from Greece and Persia to Southeast Asia, from the Tibetan highlands to the Indian Ocean. We are left in no doubt about India's vibrant presence, for two millennia, as a switch-point among civilisations? contributing to other cultures, and also borrowing from them; innovating in distinctive ways, yet also adapting from elsewhere. India was never, as some fanatics of the Indocentric position would have us believe, an isolated point of diffusion from which all marvels issued forth into the world. The questions that we find answered, or at any rate addressed, in this vibrant atlas of India's mural legacy are: How did motifs travel across Asia's trade routes, such as the nimbus and the celestial flying figure? How did techniques pass from one circle of practitioners to another, as we see from the evidence of foreshortening, shading and the gravid illusion of volume? How can we track the innumerable and invisible pilgrimages through which diverse ideas of story-telling and image-making migrated across the rivers and mountains of India? Kushanas, Hunas, Greeks and Scythians leave their mark on these pages; through inscription and silence, we re-trace the lifeworld of the Mauryas, Satvahanas, Vakatakas, Chalukyas, Rashtrakutas and Guptas, with their intricate weave of religious impulse and dynastic ambition. A similar logic of sacred and secular interface sustains the monumental achievements of the Cholas, Pandyas, Pallavas and Cheras. And indeed, the interplay between the Divine as sovereign and the sovereign as divinity may be lavishly mapped across the art of the Vijayanagara and the Nayak period. At a later date, the pleasures of technological advance? new ways of viewing the intimate and staging the epic, arriving at the visual image via theatre and photography? may be discerned in the murals of Shekhawati and Jammu. Wall painting tradition Seth proceeds by reflecting, in turn, on the key centres of the subcontinent's wall painting tradition: Ajanta, Ellora, Bagh and Badami in south-central and south India, as well as the domains of Tamil and Kerala painting; Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in north-central and western India; and Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, and the lineage of Pahari painting in north India and the Himalayan region. Each section brings us a trove of insight into the bodies of expertise and the conversations around practice through which the art of that centre evolved; we are invited into the transactions of ateliers, the intrigues of courts, the fluctuation between the material and the sublime, which informs the life of a monastery. By turn, we transit among the Hindu, Buddhist, Jaina and the Sikh traditions? these religions having sustained an unparalleled variety of mural practices in their shrines and temples, through the centuries. We note, also, the occasional overlap of technique and the synthesis of theme among these traditions. We are drawn, also, into the relationship between the wall painting and social behaviour: the ongoing negotiation between mural images and the ritual, familial and architectural atmospheres that surrothem. We wander, in these pages, through the exquisite and memorable contributions to secular art made by one Muslim dynasty after another, from the Ghuris and the Aibaks, through the Tughlaks and the Mughals, to the Deccan Sultanates. Indeed, we can re-affirm the realisation that sacred and secular are not opposite poles in Indian culture, so much as they are two aspects of a continuum; in the art of the Indic religious traditions, too, we find gods and humans, animals and celestial musicians consorting within the same lifeworld, linked together by bonds of interdependence.

Resumos Relacionados