Page:Some Notes on Indian Artistic Anatomy.djvu/5

 FOREWORD

The following notes were prepared by Mr. A. N. Tagore and illustrated by his pupils Mr. Nanda Lal Bose & Mr. Venkatappa for the purpose of answering certain criticisms against the many unreal forms and conventions which have been adopted by Indian masters in sculpture and painting and which now constitute the basis of Indian artistic anatomy. Much that is offered in these notes are tentative and scrappy and await confirmation by actual texts of the Silpa Shastras the interpretation of which still remains difficult a task.

For various reasons Indian sculpture demands a treatment of the figure more directly removed from nature than ancient Greek sculpture. The conscious aim of Indian art has been the suggestion and pourtrayal of the Divine and the Transcendental. In its greatest manifestations, Indian Art carries with it a sense of "Being beyond appearances," of a supersensuous world of mystery and exaltation. Such a world could hardly be represented in terms of a physically perfect healthy human body. It could only be symbolised in ideal types and by forms not strictly in accordance with known physiological laws but by forms which transcends the limits of the ordinary human body. The Indian Artist was thus called upon to devise certain artistic conventions and a special system of anatomy suggestive of a higher and superior ethnical type for the purpose of intimating something beyond the form of things. It was by means of these departures and variations from "natural poses" that the non-human form could possibly be rendered in terms of the human shape. The conventions adopted by these