![]() It is understood that jewels have rich color this combination of color and radiance will be a hallmark of classical Indian descriptions. Here is the verse, 1.2, “Commanded by King Pṛthu, all the other mountains took Mount Himālaya as their calf, and with Mount Meru, skilled in milking, they milked the earth to yield shining gemstones and luminous plants.” The commentary of Mallinātha explains that since a calf is so dear to its mother, it gets the best of whatever there is, in this case, the best jewels and glowing plants. Kālidāsa uses a puranic myth, that the ancient King Pṛthu milked the earth, which had taken the form of a cow, to tell us that Mount Himalaya is resplendent with many colors and aglow with its luminous plants. The setting for the poem is the great mountain Himālaya, a description of which begins the poem. Kālidāsa’s Kumārasaṃbhava, celebrating the birth of the god Skanda to Śiva and Pārvatī, makes ample use of color in its descriptions of the setting of the story and its hero and heroine. The importance of color in Sanskrit literature is apparent from its beginnings and if anything increases over the centuries as descriptions become more and more elaborate. Color, whether in the visual arts or in literature, was a vital component of the aesthetic and often the religious experience in India. Reconstructions of painted Greek sculptures are startling in the brilliance and variety of the colors ( Brinkmann et al. That early and medieval Indian sculptures were painted should not surprise us, given recent work on Greek sculptures that has revealed traces of paint. The medium of an art work significantly affects our experience of color ( Gage 2005, p. The colors on a painting do not give us an entirely adequate idea of how color in sculpture would have been experienced. The loss of their color gives us an incomplete understanding of the effects of color in art. There is considerable evidence that sculptures like this one were regularly painted ( Zin 2012, pp. Returning to the sculpture, where light and shadow now must replace color, we can only wonder what it might have been like with its original paint. As our eyes move through the additional lines created by the colors, the entire scene seems to be animated. The careful contrasts of dark and light also create a sense of depth and three dimensionality. Greens and whites similarly compel the eye to move through the painting. ![]() Thus, the oranges lead the eye from the monkey to the small figures below, down the side of the painting and around to Avalokiteśvara’s larger devotee, who leans into him, hands folded, and then across to the garment and hair of the fierce figure at the viewer’s right. ![]() ![]() By placing them together, I wanted to suggest that the vibrancy and motion in the painting also owe much to the skillful use of color. Both images, of very different size, in completely different media, rely on angular lines and curves to convey movement and create a rich and complex tableau. The Cleveland image shows traces of its original paint. in the Cleveland Museum of art, Figure 1, and a folio from a 12th century manuscript of the Aṣṭasāhasrika Prajñāpāramitā in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Figure 2. I begin this essay with two images of Avalokiteśvara, close to each other in date, a sculpture from the 11th c.
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