Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka 

 Sri Lanka

LAcNET

ACADEMIC_News

SLNet

  Join Us

              The most famous features of the Sigiriya complex are the fifth-century paintings found in a depression on the rock face more than 

 100 metres above ground level. Reached today by a modern spiral staircase, they are but fragmentary survivals of an immense backdrop of paintings that once extended in a wide band across the western face of the rock. The painted band seems to have extended to the north-eastern corner of the rock, covering thereby an area nearly 140 metres long and, at its widest, about 40 metres high.   As John still observed, the whole face of the hill appears to have been a gigantic picture gallery … the largest picture in the world perhaps’   ( Still 1907: 15).

              All that survives of this great painted backdrop are the female figures preserved in two adjacent depressions in the rock-face known as ‘ Fresco Pocket A’ and ‘ Fresco Pocket B’ (three other depressions : ‘Fresco Pockets C, D and higher up the rock face, also contain patches of plaster & pigment and, in at least one instance, fragment of a painted figure). Traces of

 plaster and pigment elsewhere on the rock-face provide further evidence of the extent of the painted band. They represent apsaras or celestial nymphs, a common motif in the religious and royal art of Asia.

           The Sigiriya paintings have been the focus of considerable interest and attention in both ancient and modern times. The poems in the graffiti on the Mirror Wall, discussed below, dating from about the sixth to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, are mostly addressed to the ladies in the painting, who seem also to have been studied and reproduced in the eighteenth century by the Kandyan artists who painted the Dambulla murals. Antiquarian descriptions of the figures in the ‘fresco pocket’ date back to the 1830s. The first proper descriptions in the nineteenth century are based on the examination of the paintings by telescope from the plain below. The first person in modern times to find his way into the fresco pocket and com face to face with the paintings was an engineer named Murray of the Public Works Department. He made tracings, copied them in pastel and published a paper in 1891.

                The first real study of the paintings, however, begins with the commencement of archaeological operations at Sigiriya by H.C.P. Bell from 1894 onwards and the facsimile copies in oils made by Muhandiram D.A.L. Perera in 1896-7.

Taprobane Map 

Sinhala Fonts

Best viewed in 800x600 pixels resolution.
 Want to reach us: webmaster@lacnet.org  All rights reserved.  Revised: February 07, 2001.