Page:Hindu Art - its Humanism and Modernism.djvu/24

 be the theme of art (IV, 90, Haas's transl.).

Lastly, can one forget that the conditions of life that produced the Byzantine and Italian masterpieces were almost similar to the milieu (economic and socio-religious) including court patronage and guild control, under which flourished the celebrated Ajanta painters and Bharhut sculptors? For in the Middle Ages in Asia as in Europe the church or the temple was the school, the art-gallery, and the museum; the priests and monks were painters, poets, calligraphists and pedagogues; and the Scriptures constituted the whole encyclopædia. And if today it is possible for the Western mind to appreciate Fra Angelico, Massaccio, and Giotto, it cannot honestly ignore the great masters of the Hindu styles,