PAINTINGS, pictures, or representations are forbidden in the second of the ten commandments, which Jews and Christians recognise. All the doctors of El-Islam differ on this head, some absolutely forbidding any delineation of what has life, under pain of being cast into hell ; others permitting pictures of the bodies, though not of the faces, of men. The Arabs are the strictest of Misiconists, yet even they allow plans and pictures of the holy shrines. Other nations are comparatively lax. The Alhambra abounds in paintings and frescoes. The Persians never object to depict in books and on walls the battles of Rustam, and the Turks preserve, in the Seraglio treasury of Constantinople, portraits by Greek and other artists of their Sultans in regular succession.
Painting as an art has attained to various degrees of excellence amongst the many nations of Eastern and Southern Asia. Hindus have often beautifully illuminated manuscripts, but the other ornaments are better executed than the figures. Muhammadan artists excel them in this art. Painting on wood, a decorative art, is practised in Kashmir, the Panjab, and Hyderabad in Sind, the ornamental designs being in the form of foliage and shawl work ; in Sind, all shades of agreeable hues of red, green, and yellow. Sind is famous also for another form of wood painting, in articles from the turning lathe, in which all these shades are used, broken by casting on other colours. It is waved or curled like the grain of marble, by the handiness of the workman, and taken up. Articles of painted pottery were exhibited from India in 1861. At the International Exhibition of 1871, beautiful painted tiles were shown from Hyder abad, Sind ; beautiful patterns on painted wood from Kashmir. The beautiful painted tiles of Hyderabad, Sind, prove that skill little inferior to that which covered the most lovely archways and other buildings of imperial Dehli, still remains at the command of the architect to-day, in districts famous of old for this class of miscellaneous paint ing. The enamels, vitrified colours on a metal
base from Jeypore, were as lovely as anything Cellone or Caradosso ever did. The Panjab enamel is usually blue and green.
The people of Kashmir execute beautiful pat terns on their papier-mache work.
The Shiahs do not entertain the same objection to pictures that Sunni Muhammadans have ; and portraits and other representations of the human figure are common among them. The art of caligraphy is carried by the Persians to the high est perfection, and they are allowed to be the best penmen in the east. Their beautiful character affords the greatest scope for a fine writer to dis play his skill. The caligrapher of the Muham madan races also displays great skill in arabesque ornamentation of his-pages, and the Guldastah-i Soohn published in Madras affords many beautiful illustrations, with ornamentation in every variety of arabesques. In white -washing their walls, over the chunam or lime plaster, the workmen of Seringapatam first give a thin coat of suday, or fine clay, which is mixed with size, and put on with a hair brush. They next give a coat of whiting made of powdered balapum or pot stone, and then finish with a coat composed of eight parts of abracum or mica, one part of powdered balapum, and one of size. The abracum is prepared from white mica by repeated grindings, the finer particles being removed for use by wash ing them from the grosser parts. The wall when finished in this manner shines like the scales of a fish ; and when the room is lighted, it has a splen did appearance.
Painting of portraits is an art which in India and China has attained to a degree of excellence. Sir Rutherford Alcock's work on the artistic works of Japan has shown the high state of excellence to which the people of that nation have attained. At the International Exhibition of 1871, the paintings on talc from Patna, Bemires and Tanjore, the Dehli paintings in ivory, and other specimens, were prominently noticed. Burton's Mecca ; Elph. p. 158.