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PAINTINGS & WOOD-CARVINGS
[PART VII
greatest building-activity and the beautifying of the temples with sculptures and paintings continued during a long period of nearly four hundred years from the fourteenth century. How deeply impressed even the European travellers of the time in India were with the colourful murals in the temples and palaces and homes of the noblemen of the day is seen in the accounts left by those like the famous Portuguese traveller Paes, who visited the Vijayanagara capital and showered praise on the painter's art. This is no exaggeration, as it is very wellknown that emperor Krsnadevaraya, himself a poet and artist, was a great patron of literature and art, being credited with the construction of more gopuras than he could have ever completed, almost like the legendary achievement of Aśoka, credited with the construction of eighty-four thousand stūpas.
Among the innumerable paintings that are found all over the vast Vijayanagara empire, on the ceilings of large gopuras and mandapas and walls of temples, the Jaina paintings on the sangita-mandapa of the Vardhamana temple at Tirupparuttikkunram in Kanchipuram are noteworthy from the point of view of Jaina themes in Vijayanagara art. Some of the paintings belong to an earlier phase, though most of them are much later. The earlier ones, in fragments, are nevertheless extremely interesting, not only from the point of view of the themes that they illustrate, but also because of the special place they occupy in the study of paintings of this period. As the mandapa was itself built by Irugappa, the minister of Bukkaraya II and a devoted follower of the Jaina faith, these paintings illustrate the painter's craft towards the end of the fourteenth century. The themes chosen are from the life of Vardhamana. Here is the nativity-scene showing Priyakariņi giving birth to Tirthankara Vardhamāna; most interesting is the theme of the child-birth both in south-Indian paintings and in carvings from Kerala, where the Rāmāyaṇa provides the scope for illustrating the theme. A comparative study of such scenes in indeed interesting. The birth and anointment-ceremony of the child by Sudharmendra accompanied by his wife Saci is painted with elegance and is quite typical in every respect of the form, deportment, ornamentation and decoration of the period. Equally interesting is Saudharmendra's dance before Vardhamana, with the legs crossed in pada-svastika.
Even with the weakening of the Vijayanagara empire after the battle of Talikota, patronage of art was continued both by the titular emperors and the now more powerful Nayaka kings who had been their erstwhile subordinates. To this Nayaka phase belong the later paintings in the Mahavira temple at Tirupparuttikkunram, of the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries. Scenes from the life of Rşabhadeva, of Vardhamana, of Kṛṣṇa, the cousin of Tirthankara Neminatha,
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