Page 128 - The Arts of China, By Michael Sullivan Good Book

be sure that one feature of this imported manner was the Indian
technique of arbitrary shading, found in the wall paintings at
Ajanta, which was used to give an effect of roundness and solidity
unlike anything that China had seen before.
WALL PAINTINGS Fortunately, the wall paintings at Tunhuang, Mai-chi-shan, and
AT TUNHUANG Ping-ling-ssu have survived—though for the most part they arc
but a faint echo of the grand manner of metropolitan China. The
first chapel at Tunhuang had been dedicated in 366. Today paint-
ings of the Northern and Western Wei can be seen in thirty-two of
the caves, and there were probably many more before dilapidation
and later repainting took their toll. Of these, the finest are in
6
Caves 257 (P 1 10) and 249 (P 101). The vigorous rendering of the
preaching Buddha in Cave 249 is a good example of the mixture of
styles that we find everywhere at Tunhuang. The stiff heraldic
pose of the Buddha shows how the "linear" Chinese manner
which wc have already seen influencing the sculpture of the period
has been frozen into a flat decorative pattern, indicating perhaps
the hand ofsome itinerant painter from central Asia, who has also
attempted, not very successfully, to suggest an Indian fullness in
the modelling of his attendant bodhisattvas and apsarases. The sub-
jects of these early frescoes are generally Buddhist trinities, scenes
from the life of the Buddha, and endlessJdtaka talcs which, under
the guise of recounting incidents in the Buddha's previous incar-
nations, draw upon a rich storehouse of Indian legend and folk-
lore. It is these delightful scenes, and not the hieratic Buddhas and
bodhisattvas crudely copying some Western model, that reveal the
Chinese journeyman artist at his most spontaneous; indeed, it is
not unlikely that while some of the main figures were executed by