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AND LITERATURE
281
Age.
second century B.C. those in Orissa, and as of later date those at Bādāmi, Patna, Elūrā and elsewhere.
If only we could trace the development from the earlier wooden structures to the exquisite eleventh-century temples, we should have solved one of the great problems of Jaina history; but we have as yet no material to do so. The blossoming period of Jaina architecture is like the sudden flowering of Flemish art under the Van Eycks: in both cases all the intermediate stages have been swept away by the ravages of time and the devastation of war, and we are abruptly confronted with the perfection of loveliness, whilst the toilsome steps that led up to it are hidden from us.
From this time the story of Jaina architecture is clear, 1. The and it seems to fall into four main divisions, the first of a
Golden which, the golden age, almost corresponds with the Gothic movement on the continent of Europe.
The plan of the temples of this period is somewhat similar : each has an open porch (maņdapa), a closed hall of assembly (sabhā mandapa), and an inner shrine or cell (gabhāro) in which the idol is kept. The whole is surrounded by a closed courtyard carrying on its inner wall numerous separate cells, each with its own small image of a Tirthankara. The temple is surmounted by a pyramidal roof, often ending in the representation of a water-pot, and only the carving on this pyramid (or Sikhara) as it appears over the temple wall gives any hint of the rich beauty enclosed within the courtyard. The inner shrine is usually guarded by richly carved doorways; the idol itself (nude and blind in the case of Digambara and with loin-cloth and staring glass eyes in the case of Svetāmbara temples) is of no artistic merit; the sabhā maņdapa has very little carving, and is only too often defaced by vulgar decorations and hideous glass globes, but the outer portico (the mandapa) is a very fairyland of beauty, the fineness of whose carving is only equalled by the white tracery of hoar-frost. From the dome of this porch hang pendants of marble,
