Vijayanagara Paintings

Language: EnglishPages: 134 (36 Color Illustrations, 30 B/W Illustrations and 17 Line Drawings,)PrefaceTo propose to write a Preface to a book on Indian Art by the late Shri C. Sivaramamurti is like undertaking to gild the lily. Indian art had perhaps never seen, after Ananda Kumaraswami, an art historian of the caliber and exemplary involvement in the rasa or essence of the gamuts of that art, like sculpture, painting and bronzes, as of Sivaramamurti. His whole being was saturated with the ethos of Indian cultural heritage, of which the superb mastery over the classical Sanskrit literature was no mean a part. He wrote copiously and wrote brilliantly, striding the centuries of art creations, across the corridors of its regional inflexions and, in the process, wrote his name as well in the Hall of Fame. Sivaramamurti’s main strength and technique lay in quoting close and winsome parallels. Between art creations, literature and coeval epigraphical data. In such a way that the integrated textures of the cultured society of India’s past lay revealed to us at talking distance. Another flair of his – one born out of his own considerable artistic gift of painting, sketching and sculpting – was to endow his descriptions and notes with an aesthetic high point, which comes only out of an experience of the nuances of creative art. Often, he added line-drawing illustrations – many of which will be found reproduced in the book under reference here – of his own to his articles and books which have the capacity of summing up, in the few vital strokes and details he gave, the real flavour of the original and its stylistic content. It is needless to add that all this was equally the sequel at various stages to the years of curatorial and supervisory work as the Officer-in-charge and Head respectively that he had put in, first at the Government Museum, MadVijayanagara Paintings