Читать книгу Art in Theory - Группа авторов - Страница 31

João de Castro was a remarkable mixture of scholar and man of action. In his early life he was involved in humanist debates in Portuguese court circles, while interests in science and geography helped him to do significant work on developing the compass for navigation. After an early military career in North Africa he went to the Portuguese colony in Goa in 1538. He subsequently led expeditions to Arabia and East Africa, mapping the coastlines en route. He later became governor and eventually viceroy of Portuguese possessions in India. Unusually for the time, he drew on his early humanist experiences to develop a positive interest in Indian art and culture. Partha Mitter’s pioneering study of changing European responses to Indian art was researched in the early 1970s and first published as Much Maligned Monsters in 1977. Mitter’s account works within an explanatory framework in which the prejudices of Christian‐inspired critiques of Indian art as ‘monstrous’ are gradually replaced by more objective Enlightenment knowledge. (For a contrasting approach which has since become dominant in post‐colonialist art studies, see the extract from Edward Said at VIIA8). One of the texts Mitter brought to light was a description by Castro of the temple of Elephanta in western India. It stands as a kind of humanist‐inspired forerunner of Enlightenment responses to Indian art, in a period otherwise dominated by negative, religiously inspired criticism. In the present extract Castro offers both an empirically grounded description of the temple and a positive assessment of its artistic accomplishment – comparing it favourably to classical examples and recommending it to the study of even the most eminent artists. Castro’s account is thus an exception to the rule that early modern Europeans tended to be mesmerized by the richness of Eastern material cultures while yet deploring their art (cf. IA6 and 9). Our extract is taken from Appendix 2 of Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art [1977], Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, pp. 326–7 and 329.

The mountain on this island is hard natural rock …¹ Beneath the mountain a vast temple was cut and fashioned, hollowing out the living rock, a temple of such marvellous workmanship that it seems impossible for it to have been made by human hands. All the works, images, columns, reliefs, workrooms, which are there are carved in the massive stone of the mountain, all of which seems to pass beyond the bounds of nature; indeed, the proportions and the symmetry with which each figure and everything else is made would be well worth the while of any painter to study, even if he were Apelles. This temple is 35 braças² long, 25 wide and about 4 high … Running through the entire temple are straight rows of columns that appear to hold up the vault which is flat and very straight. There are 42 pillars in all, spaced at regular intervals. Corresponding to the place where we set the high altar in our churches, in this temple there is a square chapel. In each wall of the chapel there is a small low doorway and each of the doorways is guarded by two ferocious giants which are 21 palmos³ high. Within this chapel is an altar placed in the middle, and above it is a large sphere which must represent the world. The whole temple is surrounded by 12 chapels, and in each of them there are many and various stories sculpted in unique Roman style [relief work?], all carved, as I have said, in the living rock. In one of these chapels is a man who reveals himself from the waist upwards and has three large faces and four arms. In his right hand he holds a hooded cobra by its head and in the left hand he holds a rose; in another hand he holds up the world and the last is too damaged to show the device he is holding. Concerning the stories in the other chapels I shall say something but only a little. In one is a large man, like a giant, who has 8 arms, two of which are raised high, apparently sustaining the vault of the chapel; in the third he has a raised sword, and in the fourth he has a little bell, but in the fifth he holds a child by one foot with its head dangling downwards; then in the sixth he holds a vessel like a bowl, and inside it is wrapped up a chain of children’s heads and a cobra. The last two of the eight arms are broken. In this chapel there are an infinite number of images with their hands upraised as if giving thanks to God. In another chapel is the figure of a gigantic woman, totally naked and with only the left breast, and with no sign of the right one, as is written of the Amazons. This temple has two doors, the main one and the side door. The main door and the main chapel are both orientated on an East‐West axis; and the side door, like the chapel with the image with three faces, is placed on a North‐South axis. And in this direction run the rows of pillars. Behind the main chapel on one side of the building is a spring of the best water I have ever seen in these parts, and nowhere in this temple is there an image which has a beard nor any that has clothing. On the left‐hand side of the main doorway is another large building in the same way excavated from the living rock, set very deep down in the mountain, where there is carved out a large temple, at the back of which are large arcades and chapels and workrooms, and everywhere are carved representations of many and various stories in relief [Roman style?] of great perfection, with many giants and dwarfs, and the whole building is set 15 braças below the mountain, and it goes a long way in. I won’t write about all its details because it would be insupportable: there are so many novelties and stories represented in it.