3. Indian Art Outside Fore-India

The excellence that Indian art acquired in the early days of the Middle Ages over the artistic creativity of other Asian peoples is due to its spread after this time to the most remote islands of the southeast Asian archipelago.

True, in the northeast, in Kashmir, we encounter a style that seems, like Gandhara art, originating directly from the ancient Greco-Roman. In Gandhar there are columns like Corinthian and Ionic, in Kashmir - like Doric, but along with this there are also three-arch door arches, resembling arches in the form of a trefoil sheet, typical of Islam or the Romanesque style in Europe, and, moreover, high sloping roofs that overlap each tier multi-storey building. The best examples of this style are the temples of Marttanda and Baniyar, where it flourished in the VI-XIII centuries and was later replaced by the art of Islam.

An entirely different person has art in Nepal, a Himalayan mountain country, in which, until modern times, both the ancient Indian religions coexisted peacefully next to each other. This country is so abundant with religious institutions that it is exaggeratedly said that it has more temples than houses, more images of gods than people. Characteristic inclination of Nepalese temples to strive in height. They are separated from the ground by a platform, on which, from the front, there is a staircase with railings decorated with figures of elephants or gods. At the same time, already in Buddhist stupas, the symbolic top canopy is usually replaced by a special tower-like superstructure; Galleries of Buddhist temples are also often crowned with a dagoby in the form of a small dome. But large Brahmin stone temples, rising up in several tiers on a square base, quite often have, moreover, a high purely Indian cone-shaped tower, more slender than the towers of Bhubaneshwar and Khajuraho, such as in the stone temple of the capital of Batgaon and in the large temple in front of Royal Palace in Patan - a building consisting of a massive base and four tiers, each of which is surrounded by porches on the columns. More often, Nepalese pagodas are shaped like Chinese towers. So, for example, the Devi-Bovani temple in Batgaon with its base, consisting of five high ledges, and an upper structure with five high, protruding rooftops, although not bent upwards in Chinese, seems to be the work of the Yang-Tse-Kiang valley, than the valleys of the Ganges. Nepalese sculpture rotates completely on Indian soil. The Ancient Nepalese Buddha statue in the Berlin Museum, described by Grunwedel, apparently did not originate from the Gandhar, but from the Old Indian type, although Nepal served as a conductor for the northern school of Buddhist teaching. The right shoulder of this figure is bare, the "knoll of intelligence" on the back of the head is covered with nothing covered over short, archaically wavy curls. This is the type that penetrated through Nepal to Tibet, the birthplace of Buddhist Lamaism.

The islands to the south of India, from Ceylon to Java and beyond, are rich in monuments of Indian art.

Ceylon is one of the places in which Buddhism was established for the first time. Here, no Brahmin reaction, no intrusion of Islam, prevented him from dominating; the art of this mountainous country washed by the sea from the time of Ashoka was and remained Buddhist. The ancient cave temples of Ceylon are distinguished only by the nudity of architecture and the absence of plastic ornaments. For the history of art are more important than they, the value of the ancient Buddhist elevated structures located on this blessed island. The most important of their ruins are in the north in Anuradhapura, the ancient Buddhist capital of the island, in the east in Polonnaruwa, the later capital, which flourished most of all in the middle of the XII century. The oldest stupas of Anuradhapura are among the largest and highest in all of India. Some of the later stupas, which are located in Tuparamaya and Lankaramaye, are distinguished by the fact that they are surrounded by a triple row of detached slender columns with a kind of capital in the shape of a flower cup with a buttoned lid, while in Anuradhapura capitals such cups are opened. Among the ruins of Polonnaruwa, the small temple of Sat-Megal-Prasad stands on a high steep pyramid, forming five large tiers and resembling itself, on the one hand, ancient Assyrian, and on the other - ancient American buildings of this kind; but it is impossible to prove any connection of this construction with this or that.

Ancient Indian type Buddha statues, sitting or standing, colossal or of the size of nature, are preserved in various sacred places of Ceylon. Among the works of ornamental plastics, preserved in various Ceylon ruins, there are images of rows of animals, lotus flowers and buds, and leafy garlands. But the actual narrative relief plastic on Ceylon, in contrast to the Indian continent, is completely absent.

At the beginning of the Middle Ages, a strong flow of Indian culture poured into the Sunda Islands. According to the map, Ole, published by A. B. Meyer, is well known in Sumatra over 60, in Java over 30, in the south and east of Borneo up to 20, in the south of Celebas at least half a dozen ancient Malay points with Indian antiquities.

Fig. 574. Relief of the temple in Borobudur. From the photo.

In Java, this most famous and most explored of the named islands, distinguished by the surprisingly majestic luxury and beauty of nature, the Brahman ruins are more common than the Buddhist ones. But this island has, in addition to other outstanding Buddhist buildings, the famous temple in Borobudur, on its southern shore, a building that represents the greatest of all creations of Buddhist art. The degree of antiquity of this temple remains uncertain. While some attribute it to the time interval between 1000 and 1300, others see in it the product of 900-1100. n e. Ferguson argued strongly that in time of its construction this temple was much closer to the period of prosperity of Buddhist art in West India and could be built between 650 and 750. n e. In any case, built by the hands of the Indians among the Malay population, it is the last great artistic creation of Indo-Buddhism and, at the same time, the most magnificent form that the idea of ​​a stupa could pour out. In fact, the famous sanctuary of Borobudur is nothing more than a stupa: it is a building without internal structure, a mass of artistically folded and decorated with sculpture stones, a giant stepping pyramid with a wide base and ten terraces, of which the six lower ones have a square plan and four upper ones round shape. The upper terrace is crowned with a dome-shaped stupa, the seventh, eighth and ninth terraces are surrounded by 72 stone cellae in the form of dagobas or bells, with bars like cages, and each of them is placed on the statue of Buddha or Bodhisattva. On the lower terraces there are galleries, corridors and niches; the walls between the niches are completely covered with crisply high-relief images (Fig. 574). The lower of these images represent the whole life of Gautama, as well as those that preceded him and later buddhas, in lively sculptural paintings, full of everyday features and executed with great freedom and purity of forms and movements; in countless repetitions of the figure of the Buddha on the upper terraces reflects the Indian worldview, according to which the individual buddhas are only members of the same chain of incarnations considered to be imprisoned on the ground. “The type of Buddha,” Grunwedel said, “is interpreted decoratively, applied to the decoration of the facades of magnificent temple structures, which, illustrating cosmogony, should depict the world of contemplative spheres on earth.” Each of the Borobudur Buddha figures is in itself one of the most beautiful and characteristic of its images that have ever been created (Fig. 575). But even in them we cannot notice the Gandharian type, but, on the contrary, the Old Indian in its noblest form. Short archaistic curls of hair on the head, a mole between the eyebrows, a hillock on the skull, tightly covered with hair, long ear lobes and thick lips - everything is there, but done with a sense of style and connected to one another without understanding the beauty. Eyes are half-closed, as it were. in a state of calm reflection. In each of these figures is reflected the external manifestation of the soul, completely retired into itself, not seeking and finding nothing in the world around it.

Fig. 575. Borobudur Buddha. From the photo

Brahman statues are also numerous in Java. But Buddhist and Brahman art quickly disappeared from this island when the Indians who emigrated to it in the 14th century were absorbed by the native half-Malaysian population.

In Indochina we meet with a new world of wonders. A. de Ponvurvill devoted a special small book "Indochinese art" to the art of this country. When publishing it, he, however, stated that the word "Indochinese" has only the name meaning, that the culture and art of Indochina did not at all derive from a combination of Indian and Chinese elements, but make up quite special, independent culture and art. Indeed, the western coast of Indochina for more than a thousand years was under Indian influence, while Chinese culture from time immemorial spread along the eastern shores of Indochina, which then more or less obeyed the French. Therefore, in the northeast and east of the peninsula, art always had a Chinese imprint on it, whereas in Western Burma, Siam and Cambodia, art flourished for many centuries, which, with all its features, was undoubtedly of Indian origin.

In Burma, which adopted Buddhism early, numerous stupas were preserved, partly in a peculiar form, erected in ancient and new times. In Burma, as well as in Pego, there are also quite a few temples that have an interior and are decorated in Indian taste. But the original Burmese construction of temples, in essence, recognizes only massive lagging structures within which separate passages and cella are contained, while the exterior is a beautiful two-tier building with a quadrangular cross-shaped base surmounted by a tall slender dome. The main temples of the capital Pegu belong to the XI and XII centuries. It is remarkable that they are purely brick, that they have real arches of wedge-shaped pieces, pointed gables protruding in the form of tongues of flame, and portals, that they end in a false dome, which apparently originated from the conical towers of Orissa and north- west india; but the most striking thing about these buildings is the complete absence of decorative sculpture; but at the corners, along ledges and cornices, they are decorated with numerous repetitions of small models of pagodas, somewhat reminiscent of the pointed turrets and canopies of European Gothic buildings.

In Siam, the central state of Indochina, which is washed by the sea from the south, the ruins of the ancient capital of this country, Ayutthaya, and the luxurious, burdened with details of the architecture of the new capital of Bangkok, deserve attention. Ayutthaya flourished from the middle of the XIV, Bangkok - from the middle of the XVII century. Ayutthaya tower pagodas also differ in their special form, the main features of which are Old Indian. They are neither approximately conical in shape, like the towers of the north, nor the type of the lagging structures of South India, but being of the same diameter both above and below, they consist of several tiers of the same width, quadrangular or approximately cylindrical shape, and are crowned with a dome in the form of dagoba. In Bangkok, we see repetitions of towers of this kind, but they form here only the tops of the steeply rising uphill pyramids with a quadrangular plan, the ledges of which are decorated with luxurious through balustrades, plastic ornaments and gates, the shoals of which are topped with gables and sharp towers. The details of these buildings really break Chinese motives. One of the characteristic examples of this luxurious, but restless and purely "external" architecture can serve as the Wat Ching pagoda in Bangkok.

The true wonders of Indochinese art are found only in Cambodia, the ancient southern state of the peninsula, the country of the Khmers, who, whatever root they belonged to, were in any case one of the most artistic tribes of Asia. Ponturville himself admitted that their art, which Ferguson believed was flourishing from X to XIV century, was a branch of Hindustan art. But one cannot help wondering how the Khmer, thanks to their subtle sense of the grandeur of the whole, their correct calculation of the smallest details, their clear understanding of the correctness and proportionality, breathed new life into the Hindustan tradition; It is extremely remarkable that, being surrounded on all sides by Buddhism, they professed the Brahman religion with a particularly pronounced serpent cult and the teachings of Nagi. In the ancient reliefs in their temples, instead of episodes from the life of the Buddha, we find numerous images on themes from ancient Brahmin heroic poetry; but the presence in them of numerous statues of a seated and standing Buddha, together with the four-headed Brahma and other multi-armed Brahman deities, is also curious. Probably the original Brahmin temples, after Siam conquered Angkor, the capital of Cambodia, were devoted to Buddhist bonses in the service of Gautama. Especially much is found in the plastic of these ruins of the plots from the legends of Nagi. Next to the gigantic elephants, depicted naturally, with lions and tigers, stylized archaically, the king of snakes with seven or nine heads, arranged in the form of a fan, served as a favorite decoration of the buildings.

Fig. 576. Column of the large Angkorvat pagoda. According to Ferguson

The most important ruins of Khmer structures are located on the border of Siam and present-day Cambodia, between the Mekong River and a large inland lake. Of these structures, the largest pagoda in Angkor Wat has survived better than others. According to South Indian designs, her overall plan is three square walls, one inside the other; at a considerable distance they are enclosed by a fourth wall, which, thanks to the elongated street leading to the temple, forms an oblong rectangle. Three internal squares rise one above the other in the form of ledges, of which each top one is less than the previous one. The lower tier opens outwards with a gallery with pillars 250 meters long. The gallery is interrupted by multi-syllable portals with rectangular doors that have gables decorated with teeth in the form of torches (flames). Above the portals and on the corners of the ledges rise massive towers, of which the largest in the middle, above the very sanctuary. These towers are nine-level steep pyramids of rounded shape, have a general appearance of cones, end at the top with slender spiers and are decorated in each tier with balustrades with torches. Everything here is distributed more evenly and symmetrically than in the Dravidian pagodas. The superiority of the Khmer architects to the North Indian is also shown in the classical decoration of all 1,532 tetrahedral columns or pilaster of this temple; their elegant bases and capitals, consisting of elegantly decorated rollers and grooves, are in proper proportion with the rods and resemble the forms of the Roman-Doric style or the Renaissance style (Fig. 576).

Fig. 577. Relief on the rod of one of the columns of the large Angkorvat pagoda. According to Ferguson

Only the lower part of the rods is sometimes decorated with exquisitely made relief work (Fig. 577). In general, in the art of Khmer sculpture plays a service role in architecture, without merging, however, with it into one indivisible whole, as in Hindustan. The sculptural images of the narrative content are filled with a real high relief and fill all the spaces of the walls defined for them by the architect and in no way occupied. Gigantic figures of people and animals, sculpted completely round, arranged, like guards, at the entrances to the stairs and temples, everywhere in the right places. But what is more original in Khmer art is the use of the giant snake motif for railings on the streets and bridges leading to the main portals. The body of the snake forms a horizontal crossbar of the railing, while the vertical supports of this last consist either of short pillars similar to woody ones, like in Angkor Wat, or of massive human figures, like in Angkor Preah Khan, while seven or nine heads King of snakes, rising up, form the front ends of the railing. In the Khmer Museum in Trocadero in Paris are stored parts of a similar balustrade with the king of snakes that make up the top crossbar. По реставрации Делапорта большая терраса в Пиманакасе была также украшена балюстрадами, в которых львы, стоя на страже, служили подпорками, а семиголовые исполинские змеи составляли верхние перекладины. Фигуры людей в архаическом фронтальном положении, с массивными сдавленными членами тела, охраняли храм в Преа-Тколе. Но что всего замечательнее в развалинах башен некоторых из кхмерских зданий, это органическое сочетание исполинских голов с архитектурными частями. Со всех четырех сторон башни вделано в нее по огромной голове таким образом, что верхняя часть сооружения образует над этими головами высокую многоярусную тиару, как бы увенчивающую четырехликое божество. Нет никакого сомнения в том, что это божество не кто иной, как Брахма. Точно так же "всезиждитель" смотрит вниз с одних из ворот в Ангкор-Тхоме; точно так же, по реставрации, сделанной Делапортом на основании сохранившихся частей, несколько дюжин подобных лиц смотрело с высоты многобашенного и многоярусного храма в Байоне (рис. 578), причем каждый ярус был украшен рядом небольших портиков на колоннах с фронтонами, увенчанными языками пламени. Храм этот был если не большой, то самый роскошный и самый необычный из всех храмов Ангкора. Во всем мире не было равного ему по сказочному великолепию; поразительны в нем почти хрустальная ясность и правильность архитектурного целого, соединявшиеся с самой причудливой роскошью, с самой фантастической пышностью.

Fig. 578. Bayon pagoda near Angkor in Siam. Delaport

This is not the case for the Khmer Plastics. It’s not possible to reproduce the semi-Mongolian population, but the semi-Alayan type of population. Noses are more flat, eyes are more flat, There is a lot of peace and harmony on the outer walls of the Bayon towers. This is the dominant in Indian of the Indochina.

From the gates of grottoes and pagodas, from the height of stupas and temple towers, from the eyes of the Buddhist and Brahman gods of Indian art, hundreds of mysterious questions flow down to us; However, this art does not seem to us as undeveloped, arbitrary and fantastic, as it was considered by former researchers. It is now recognized that Indian art, unlike any other art in the world as a whole, was strong enough, in the sense of nationality, to borrow from foreign countries only external particulars and assimilate them, however, without intending to use them. wholly and compromise their own property; Now we already have the opportunity to trace the gradual course of development in the history of Buddhist architecture in India, starting with the simplest stupa of Hindustan and Ceylon to the marvelous building in Borobudur on Java, as well as studying the progress of architecture of the Brahmin pagodas, ranging from simple buildings in Ayvulli and Konarak and to magnificent , the complex groups of buildings in South India and Indochina; now an attempt has been made to present the history of the development of the Buddha statues, to explain the content of most of the high-relief and bas-relief sculptures of Indian temples much more thoroughly and to determine their relationship with the history of the development of religious ideas to a greater extent than we could do within the narrow framework of our review.

Indian art, undoubtedly, greatly lacked an understanding of the laws in individual artistic fields; there is also no doubt that it was no further than a superficial presentation in the transmission of spiritual content, even more than in technology. But, on the other hand, it is impossible to deny that Indian artists were endowed with a peculiar sense of nature and a peculiarly strong fantasy. To be fair to Indian art, we must remember that it belongs exclusively to the sensual and dreamy world of the hottest tropical belt. It is before us unconditionally and undoubtedly the highest creation of inspired human skill in this area, a truly tropical art in all respects.