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96 revelled in the task of giving artistic expression to the exuberant beauty of the tropical forest. The magnificent mandapam of the sixteenth century (Pl. XXXIII, ), built by the Kings of Vijayanagar for their royal chapel dedicated to Vishnu, perhaps indicates the highest point to which Indian genius attained in that direction.

This wonderful mandapam may give an idea of the earlier wooden pavilions of Nālanda, with their "pillars ornamented with dragons, beams resplendent with all the colours of the rainbow—rafters richly carved—columns ornamented with jade painted red and richly chiselled," as Hiuen Tsang described it. The later work of the same school in Southern India, however astonishing it may be technically, begins to run wild and often loses all artistic coherence. But in Northern India the reaction caused by the Muhammadan conquest and the restriction of sculptured ornamentation imposed by the law of Islam created a new school of Indian craftsmen—the so-called Indo-Saracenic—based upon Hindu technical traditions but more rationalistic and worldly in its ideals, though the mysticism of the East still clung to them.

The typical works of this school are the pillared pavilions of Fatehpur Sikri (Pl. XLIX, ) built for Akbar, and the famous private audience hall of Shah Jahān at Delhi (Pl. XXXIII, ), his Elysium on earth of white marble and precious inlay, the exquisite elegance of which is no less remarkable than the gorgeous sculptured beauty of the Vijayanagar temple mandapam built about a century earlier.

The typical plan of a monastery, as we have seen, reproduced that of the Indo-Aryan joint-family house—a series of chambers grouped round an open court.