Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/185

 CHAP. V. CHAITYA HALLS AT AjANTA. no inscription exists upon it which would assist in assigning it any precise date ; but it belongs to a group of viharas, Nos. 16 and 17, whose date, as we shall after- wards see, can be fixed with tolerable certainty as belonging to the end of the 5th century A.D. The cave itself, as will be seen from the plan (Woodcut No. 73), is of the smallest size, nearly the same as No. 9, or 46 ft. 4 in. in length, by 23 ft. 7 in. wide and 24 ft. 4 in. high, and its arrangements do not differ much, but its details belong to a totally different school of art. All trace of wood- work has disappeared, but the wooden forms are everywhere repeated in stone, like the triglyphs and mutules of the Doric order, long after their original 73- Chaitya No. 19 at Ajanta. i T/T it. .LI.- Scale so ft. to i in. meaning was lost. More than this, painting in the interval had to a great extent ceased to be the chief means of decoration, both internally and externally, and sculpture substituted for it in monumental works ; but the greatest change of all is that Buddha, in all his attitudes, is introduced everywhere. In the next woodcut (No. 74) the view of the facade it will be seen how completely figure- sculpture had superseded the plainer architectural forms of the earlier caves. The rail ornament, too, has entirely dis- appeared ; the window heads have been dwarfed down to mere framings for masks ; but, what is even more significant than these, is that from a pure atheism we have passed to an over- whelming idolatry. At Karle the eight figures that originally adorned the porch are chiefs or donors with their wives, in pairs. All the figures of Buddha that appear there now are long subsequent additions. None but mortals were sculptured in the earlier caves, and among these 5akyamuni nowhere appears. Here, on the contrary, he is Bhagavat the Holy One the object of worship, and occupies a position in the front of the dagaba or altar itself (Woodcut No. 75, p. 153), surmounted by the triple umbrella and as the Numen of the place. We may be able, in the near future, to fix more nearly the time in which this portentous change took place in Buddhist ritual. For the present it is sufficient to remark that images of Buddha, and their worship, were not known in India much before the commencement of our era, and that the revolution was complete by the 4th century, if not earlier. Before leaving this cave, however, it may be well to remark on the change that had taken place in the form of the dagaba