Gods and Gryphons
The Art and Architecture of the Ancient Orient. By Henri Frankfurt. (Penguin Books, 42s.) The Art of India Through the Ages. By Stella Kramrisch. (Phaidon Press, 37s. 6d.)
IF one could measure the greatness of the eastern cultures by the ease with which their works of art can be assimilated to the taste of an English drawing-room, Persia, China and Japan, would have things all their own way. We prize their porcelain, lacquer and carpets and accord them a place of honour which we have good reason to deny to the objects that for generations have poured in from India and the nearer Moslem lands. It is the Benares brass, the pseudo-Egyptian bowls that so fatally mimic the genuine ones of ancient Phoenicia, and the lamentable Moorish tables that find their way via the servants' quarters to the lumber room Except in a few transmuted fragments—a sphinx at a park gate, an Ionic volute, a chintz, a Coromandel screen—the arts that embodied Shiva and the Buddha, that cele- brated the might of Darius and Ashurbanipal, have never travelled westwards. With the fading of our classical tradition and the lightening of our instinctive Hellenistic bias we can now perhaps come closer to the origins of eastern art than at any time since our own Dark Ages, for the oldest things in either of the present books reflect the experiments of many a studio.
Professor Frankfurt's book, which is a valuable and (apart from the failure to give correct references from the text to the plates) a useful addition to the Pelican History of Art series, is misleadingly entitled, since it deals only—as if this were not enough—with the sculpture, architecture and minor arts of Mesopotamia and the lands under its immediate influence from the earliest times to the fall of the first Persian empire. The subject bristles with difficulties. In this area, over this enormous period of time, Lower Mesopotamia alone shows anything like a continuous tradition in the major arts, and even here the rarity of stone, the concentration of all work above the smallest scale under royal patronage (one must remember the featureless ordinary buildings of eastern mud- brick towns), and the frequent sackings, have conspired against our knowledge. Here, nevertheless,, one can watch the relatively sudden arrival of sculpture in history. Some of the early heads are splendid (plate 7 for example); those associated with the reigns of Gudea of Lagash, Sargon of Akkad and Hammurabi show a flair for a kind of idealised near-portraiture approaching mastery. It was never quite achieved. In the north and east arose derivative styles' that perished with the dynasties which sponsored them. The Assyrians advanced with speed and enterprise; their later battle reliefs called for more and more experiments in composition to gather the trampling, charging multitudes out of chaos into victory. The architecture of the Khorsabad palace shows the same talent for ambitious integration. All this stopped dead with the sack of Nineveh. Achmmenid Persia showed no such taste for movement. 'I, Darius the Mede,' say the tall, exotic columns, the long lines of unwaveringly vertical figures; for all their eclecticism they freeze, rather than elaborate, the majesty of the Great Kings. (Only the cylinder seals, over three millennia, maintain their brisk, fluent, unearthly little ballet.) Though the greatest gifts of the region may have lain in that patterned half-world of the imagination which we in Europe were to ,people with the figures of tapestry and heraldry, it left in the plastic arts a legacy, largely unclaimed, of great vitality and power. Small, solid and emphatic stand the gods of Babylonia; scenting the hunt, the antelope lifts a hesitant foreleg; the King extends a herculean sword-arm to butcher a lion. It is hard to square these things with the ,suggestion, so often advanced, that the genius of these lands was confined to surface ornament. Over the shoulder of the Moslem calligraphist, as he traces his quatrain in gold with a single hair for a Moghul emperor, one imagintl a giant with strong and idle hands.
'In the seventh month came ambassadors out of India, bearing as gifts two tigresses and a self-burning gymnosbphist.' The parody may serve to underline that untranslatable element in Hindu civilisation which made its great art the most curious and least exportable in the culture of the Old World—a difficulty which, despite her publishers' claims, appears to have defeated Professor Kramrisch. It has nothing to do with technical primitiveness, for both in the Indus valley (as shown by two astonishingly mature torsos at least four thousand years old) and again in the swift renaissance of the last few centuries before Christ, the supple, exuberant bodies reduce those of Mesopotamia to ineffectual cones. It seems to arise from the extreme subtlety and abstruseness of the spiritual message, long since framed in words and increasingly overlaid by a giant paganism, with whose interpretation the sculptors and architects of the classic centuries were charged. However this may be, books on Indian art tend most distressingly to consist of arresting illustrations accompanied by a text compounded of naive enthusiasm and potted theosophy. The present book is only a partial exception. The plates, superb in themselves and numbering nearly two hundred, record triumph after triumph over a wide and unfamiliar range. Here are the elegantly, mindlessly sensual nymphs, the Vishnus, Shivas and trinities on whose faces realism cunningly defers to otherworldliness in the enunciation of cosmic truth, the temples that symbolically orchestrate the whole of creation. Among the last-named, the great tower of Khajuraho and the
intricate but finely disciplined wall of Nilkanthesvara show these strange harmonies at their most memorable. The huge, tumultuous shrines of the later South, and of Cambodia, Ceylon and Java, are unhappily omitted. (Restraint, in this tremendous surge, was hardly to be expected and in orthodox Hinduism was seldom attained, but there are Jain caves whose sculptural content is as cool and spare as anything in Europe. These, too, are missing.) Seldom, alas, does the text reach the level of coherent art criticism or relate the art of India to that of anywhere else. At best it succeeds adequately in relating these prodigies to Hindu philosophy and ritual; at worst, and this quite often, it relates them to nothing at all.
H. M. CHAMPNESS
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