upon the myth of Vishnu and Lakshmi. The Bodhisattva holds in his right hand Vishnu's blue lotus, and his tiara bears the three jewelled sun-discs like the Vishnu in the Trimūrti sculpture of Elephanta. The figure is over life-size, and is one of the most finished and powerful in technique of the Ajantā paintings. It is supposed to belong to about the beginning of the seventh century.
The frescoes of Sigirīya in Ceylon are painted in two recesses of the rock on the hill which was the retreat of the parricide King Kasyapa I at the end of the fifth century. Owing to their almost inaccessible position, they are in a better state of preservation, and thus more suitable for reproduction, than any of the Ajantā paintings. They are closely related to the Ajantā school. The subject is a procession of royal ladies, supposed to be Kasyapa's queens, with attendants bringing floral offerings, to a shrine which seems to be located in the Tusitā heavens, for the figures appear as if half immersed in clouds—the usual convention for the heavenly spheres.
The finest of the figures (Pl. LXXIII) are drawn by a master's hand, swift and sure, but swayed by the impulse of the moment, as one can see by the rapid alteration of the pose of an arm or hand visible in some of the paintings. These exhibit the best qualities of the Ajantā paintings and of the great masters of China and Japan. Others are less subtle in the drawing and more laboured in the modelling—evidently the work of pupils.
The Sigirīya paintings, if they may be attributed correctly to Kasyapa's court painters, are the only extant works of the secular schools of Indian painting before Muhammadan times. But possibly they were painted by the monks of the neighbouring Buddhist
