Page:Hindu Art - its Humanism and Modernism.djvu/23

 Hindu art has flourished in still life, social (genre), natural, plant, and animal studies as well. The avoidance of the nude in early Christian art has its replica in the East. Physical beauty was not more often a taboo in Hindu art-psychology than in the Western. The dignity of the flesh has left its stamp on India's water colors, gouache paintings, and stone and bronze.

Even the figures of the Hindu gods and goddesses are to be perceived as projections of the human personality. The medieval Rajput paintings of the Radha-Krishna cycle and the Shiva-Doorga cycle can have but one secular appeal to all mankind. Accordingly we are not surprised to, find in Dhananjaya the medieval dramaturgist's Dasha-roopa the dictum that anything and everything can