Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 2.djvu/94

 66 JAINA ARCHITECTURE. BOOK V. remarkable for beauty, and difficult to render intelligible without more illustration than it merits. This leads to a triple sanctuary, marked by three jikharas, or spires, externally. Behind this is a smaller court with two groups of seven shrines, one in each angle, with a larger cell in the centre, and two still more important, at the point of junction between it and the front court. To the eye of a European, unaccustomed to its forms, some of them may seem strange ; but its arrangement, at least, will probably be admitted to be very perfect. Each part goes on increasing in dignity as we approach the sanctuary. The exterior expresses the interior more completely than even a Gothic design ; and whether looked at from its courts or from the outside, it possesses variety without confusion, and an appropriateness of every part to the purpose for which it was intended. 1 JAINA TEMPLE, DELHI. There is one other example that certainly deserves notice before leaving this branch of the subject, not only on account of its beauty, but its singularity. In the preceding pages it has frequently been necessary to remark upon that curious wooden strut by which the Jains sought to relieve the apparent weakness of the longer beams under their domes. It occurs at Abu (Woodcut No. 284), at Girnar, at Udayapur, and many other places we shall have to remark upon in the sequel ; everywhere, in fact, where an octagonal dome was used. It was also employed by the Hindus in their torans, and so favourite an ornament did it become that Akbar used it frequently both at Agra and Fathpur Sikri. For centuries it continued without much alteration, but in stone, as for example in the great Baoli at Bundi, 2 we find it a mere ornament, and it is generally used as such. It was left, however, for a Jaina architect of the end of the 1 8th or beginning of last century, in the Muhammadan city of Delhi, to suggest a mode by which what was only conven- tionally beautiful might really become an appropriate, and really, constructive part of lithic architecture. As will be observed in the next cut (No. 300), the architect has had the happy idea of filling in the whole of the back of the strut with pierced foliaged tracery of the most exquisite device thus turning what, though elegant, was one of the feeblest parts of Jaina design into a thoroughly constructive stone bracket ; one of the most pleasing to be found in Indian architecture, and doing this while preserving all its traditional 1 For more details see ' Archaeological Survey of Western India,' vol. viii. pp. 8;f., and plates 69-71. 2 ' Picturesque Illustrations of Indian Architecture,' plate 17.