SCULPTURES. Monuments, decorated build ings, and sculptured texts have been the prin cipal modes which the various rulers and their wealthy subjects have adopted to perpetuate their edicts, their names, and fame. The history of the ancient races in all the south of Asia is to be read in their sculptures, and that of Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia, and British India is being daily added to by means of relics which are bei»g exhumed after an interval of 2000 or 3000 years. The Jews were forbidden to make the likeness of anything in the heavens above, or on the earth beneath, in order to bow down and worship it. But with the Egyptians of old, and with the Hindu and Buddhist religionists now, the art of sculpture is the very pillar of their religion ; tlie priests in every temple first made (and still make) their god, and then worshipped it ; as in Exodus xx. 4, the Egyptians worshipped figures of the sun as Ra, and of the stars as the other gods, as also images of men, beasts, birds, and fishes ; but the earliest examples of Indian sculpture ace' to be seen in the rails of Budh Gaya and Bharhut of the age B.C. 250 to 200. Elephants', deeroind monkeys are better represented the,re than in any sculptures known in any part of the world ; so too are soine trees, and the architectural details are cut with an elegance and precision which are very admirable. The human figures, too, are truthful -to nature, • though differing from the European standard of beauty awd grace, and where groirped together conabine to express the action intended with singular felicity.
In the first century of the Christian era, there arose in the extreme N.W. of India, in the Panjab, and to the W. of the Indus, a school of sculpture strongly impregnated with the traditions of Greek art, and which continued to flourish tlaere for the first five centuries of the Christian era. What the Buddhists were to the architec ture of Northern India, that the Greeks were to its sculpture. Greek faces and profiles constantly occur in ancient Buddhist statuary, and par ticularly pure iu the Panjab. Proceeding south
wards from the Panjab, the Greek type begins to fade. Purity of outline gives place to luscious ness of form. In the female figures the artists trust more to swelling breasts and towering chignons, and load the neck with constantly accumulating jewels. Nevertheless the Grecian type long survived in Indian art. It is per fectly unlike the coarse conventional ideal of beauty in modern FIindu sculptures, and may perhaps be traced as late as the delicate pro files on the Sun Temple at Kanarak, built in the 12th century A.D. on the Orissa shore. Borrowing an impulse from Greek models, the Buddhist sculptors, at the commencement of the Christian era, freed theinselves from the oriental tradition, which demands only the gigantic and the grotesque, and imitated nature with some success. But with the revival of Brahmanism, IIindu sculpture again• degenerated, and it pos sesses a religious rather than an msthetic interest.
In the 4th and 5th centuries, at Amraoti, a school of sculpture was developed partaking of the characteristics both of those of Central India and of the west, and the degree of art displayed by sculpture there may be regarded as the culmi nating point attained by that art in India. In the subsequent sculpture of the early- Hindu ternples and later Buddhist caves, it has lost much of its higher msthetie and phonetic qualities, and frequently resorts to expedients of doubling the size of principal personages, and of distinguishing gods from men by giving them more heads and hands than ordinary beings. This is done with considerable vigour and richness of effect in the temples of Orissa and Mysore ; and in the sonth of India some of the most remarkable groups and statues :continued to be executed down to the middle of the 18th century. But though the technic art of architecture continues to be practised with considerable success, their paintings and sculptured decorations excite only feelings of dismay, the result of the deterioration of moral and intellectual power.