Author: Anderson Galleries

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2018-10-04

Total Pages: 96

ISBN-13: 9781396607059

Excerpt from Art From India and Persia, Including Sixteenth Century Persian Rugs: Being Additions to the Catalogue of a Well-Known European Connoisseur Recently Delivered From the Customs The present collection consists mainly of Near Eastern art, but it may be enjoyed and studied from different points of view. The first is a widely human one - the enjoyment of pleasant Shapes and intense colors, harmonized by the maker and mel lowed by age. The glowing turquoise of a Kashan bowl or the same hue in a 14th century Sultanabad vase, veiled by a rich silvery iridescence, does not need any commentary or explanation. The same may be said of the great variety of other potteries and various Objects of art contained in this collection. The large Mesopotamian and Persian jars are a gorgeous colorful decora tion and the lacquer painted palace doors would be worthy to screen the secrets of a palace of the Arabian Nights. In these latter days of ours there are other strange and rare enjoyments of art. An old weathered piece of bronze, a simple negro wood carving from the Congo, an early Chinese stone head and a little Egyptian sculpture, teach the same lesson of reserved dignity and refinement. It is strange how all these small objects, gathered from the four corners of the earth, form a complete spiritual unit which impresses deeply those who understand its message. For the first time in a New York auction room the same primitive spirit will be shown in examples of East Indian art. The present collection shows a wide range of evolution. It contains several examples of sculptures of the Gandhara school. These interesting sculptures Show a strong greco-roman influ ence and were formerly considered as the beginnings of Indian sculpture. This conception is wrong. Greco-roman art was a world-wide formula, nearly as world-wide as its successor, the Italian Renaissance, which inspires the bank buildings in Gopher Prairie, Minnesota, and on the Rio de la Plata. But this Greco Roman art did not touch the spirit of the people. It was a passing form into which the different nations of the world in fused their own spirit. There was certainly a school of sculpture in India before the greco-roman period, but its material being wood, this art was doomed to rapid destruction in a tropical climate. Even when the greco-roman influence was strongest in India, these early Buddhistic Gandhara sculptures had a charm and spirituality which makes them far more interesting than the contemporaneous works of the classic decadence. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.