#coomaraswamy

[raisongardee]

"Il n’est prétendu nulle part que la beauté du corps puisse être une mauvaise chose en soi ; la beauté corporelle étant plutôt prise comme signe extérieur d’un bien-être, ou santé, intérieur et constitutionnel. Que pareille beauté et santé, bien qu’étant un grand bien en soi, puisse aussi être appelée vaine d’un autre point de vue, cela sera évident pour tout le monde : par exemple, si un homme est tellement attaché au bien-être du corps qu’il ne veuille risquer sa vie pour une bonne cause. A quel point la philosophie chrétienne conçoit peu la beauté naturelle comme quelque chose de mauvais en soi, cela peut se voir chez Augustin, qui dit que le beau se trouve partout et en toutes choses, "par exemple dans un coq de combat" (De ordine I, 25 : il choisit le coq de combat comme quelque chose d’une certaine façon méprisable de son propre point de vue), et que cette beauté dans les créatures est la voix de Dieu qui les a faites (confessio ejus in terra et in coelo, Enarr. in ps., CXLVIII), point de vue qui est inséparable également de la notion de monde conçu comme une théophanie (comme chez Erigène) et de la doctrine du vestigium pedis (comme chez Bonaventure). D’un autre côté, être attaché aux formes telles qu’elles sont en elles-mêmes, c’est précisément ce que l’on entend par "idolâtrie", et, comme le dit Eckhart (Evans, I, 259) "pour trouver la nature elle-même, toutes ses formes doivent être brisées, et plus complètement cela se fait, plus proche sera la chose actuelle" ; cf Jami, "Si tu as peur de boire le vin du flacon de la Forme, tu ne peux drainer la liqueur de l’Idéal. Mais cependant, attention ! Ne sois pas retardé par la Forme : efforces-toi plutôt de vite traverser le pont"."

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, La Théorie médiévale de la Beauté, trad. Jacques Thomas, 1946.

#coomaraswamy #tradition #beaute

[nobrashfestivity]

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Seated Female Nude 1897–1919

#Ananda K. Coomaraswamy #drawing

[entheognosis]

We ‘preserve' folk songs, at the same time that our way of life destroys the singer…we are proud of our museums, where we display the damning evidence of a way of life that we have made impossible.

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

#Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

[balladedutempsjadis]

I found this fascinating article about Ananda Coomaraswamy, the great art historian (1877-1947) who made it his life’s mission to put Indian art on the world’s map of artistic traditions. But there’s also a lot of interesting information about metallurgy during the Chola period as well. It pairs well with the Vidya Deheja book I’m reading. (One of the things Dehejia mentions is that there are no copper deposits in Tamil Nadu that could supply the massive amount of bronze used by the Chola statues and inscriptions so historians are trying to figure out where they got the copper from. Bihar? Rajasthan? Southeast Asia? The interconnected trade networks of this period are also fascibating; she quotes 12th century letters from a Jewish trader in Aden with a Jewish bronze factory owner in Mangalore. The world has always been much more interconnected than we’ve imagined. Sri Lanka is also a tantalizing source of copper - a reason the Cholas wanted to conquer it?)

https://www.sahapedia.org/the-nataraja-bronze-and-coomaraswamys-legacy

#historical metallurgy #ananda coomaraswamy #Indian art #chola chola #ponniyin selvan

[houseofallegories]

But there is a profound distinction between the deliberate pursuit of pleasure and the enjoyment of pleasures proper to the active or contemplative life. It is one of the greatest counts against our civilization that the pleasures afforded by art, whether in the making or of subsequent appreciation, are not enjoyed or even supposed to be enjoyed by the workman at work. ….."the craftsmen likes talking of his handicraft," but, the factory worker likes talking of the ball game.

-AKC

#philosophy #sociology #mythology #art history #art #Ananda Coomaraswamy #quote

[kino-free-time]

Reclining Nude Woman

early 1900s. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (Sri Lankan, 1877–1947). Ink on paper.

source

#found by kino #art history #Ananda Coomaraswamy #sri lanka #ink #nude art

[raffaellopalandri]

Book of the Day - Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul

Book of the Day – Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul

Today’s Book of the Day is Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos, Science of the Soul written by Titus Burckhardt and published in 1997 by Fons Vitae (the book was originally published in 1960, in German, under the title Alchemie, Sinn- und Weltbild). Eminent Swiss metaphysician and scholar Dr. Titus Burckhardt (1908 – 1984) was an expert and a leading member of the Perennialist or Traditionalist…

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#Alchemical Marriage #Alchemy #Alchemy of Prayer #Alchemy: Science of the Cosmos #Ananda Coomaraswamy #Calcination #Coagulation #Conjunction #Dissolution #Distillation #Emerald Tablet #Fermentation #Harry Oldmeadow #Huston Smith #Jean-Louis Michon #Marco Pallis #Martin Lings #Materia Prima #Nicolas Flamel #Raffaello Palandri #Raffaello Palandri Alchemy #René Guénon #Science of the Soul #Separation #Seven Stages #Seyyed Hossein Nasr #soul #Spirit #Sufism #Titus Burckhardt

[bluestangel]

Has it never occurred to you that it is much your duty to make your lives and environment beautiful as to make them moral, in fact that without beauty there can be no true morality, without morality no true beauty?

Art and Swadeshi by Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

#blueacacia #ananda k coomaraswamy #art and swadeshi #quotes #images #beauty #morality #bluestangel #literature

[csendkiraly]

Ananda Coomaraswamy: The arts & crafts of India & Ceylon

#art #art history #indian art #culture studies #ananda coomaraswamy

[smithsonianlibraries]

Illustration entitled "The Return of Rama" by artist K. Venkatappa from Sister Nivedita's and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's Myths of the Hindus & Buddhists (1914).

Full text here.

#Indian art

[raisongardee]

"Ainsi que l’indique St. Augustin, De musica, VI, 38, certains prennent plaisir dans les deformia, et ceux-là, les grecs les appelaient dans leur langue saprójiloi, ou, comme nous dirions, pervertis ; cf. BG XVII, 10. Augustin indique ailleurs (lib. de ver. rel. 59) que, alors que les choses qui nous plaisent le font parce qu’elles sont belles, la réciproque, à savoir que les choses sont belles parce qu’elles nous plaisent, n’est pas vraie."

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, La Théorie médiévale de la Beauté, trad. Jacques Thomas, 1946.

#coomaraswamy #musique #tradition #decadence

[nobrashfestivity]

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy

Seated Female Nude

1897–1919

#ananda k. coomaraswamy #drawing

[brooklynmuseum]

Happy Diwali! ✨

The festival of Diwali celebrates the triumph of light over darkness. Families come together to light oil lamps and fireworks and everyone indulges in sweets and fried foods. Although he is not central to the holiday, the elephant-headed god Ganesha is often included in Diwali observances because he helps people to overcome obstacles in the coming year and because he is famously fond of the same sweets that are available in abundance during the holiday.

You can see this artwork on view on the newly reopened second floor of the Museum, entirely dedicated to the Arts of Asia and the Islamic World.

🎨 Indian. Ganesha, ca. 1775-1800. Opaque watercolor on paper, sheet: 8 3/16 x 11 5/16 in. (20.8 x 28.7 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Gift of Dr. Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, 36.242 (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)

#Brooklyn Museum #brooklyn #museum #art #bkmartsofasia #BkMIslamicWorldArts #Diwali #ganesha #holiday #painting

[odetopictorialism]

Ananda K. Coomaraswamy • Stella Bloch, 1920

#pictorialism

[hariyali]

Resource Masterlist: Indian Art

Cheap/Free resources:

Wkipedia:

Wikipedia of Indian Art: I'll recommend reading the subtopics from bottom up; it seems more relevant that way!

Wikipedia of Indian Painting: once you go through this article you should further look into whichever style you like, and learn it in depth. It also has links to vernacular art.

Rasa: the classical theory of Indian aesthetics

From Archive.Org (maybe scholarly and/or illustrative. In case illustrations are not there, simply Google them for reference):

Stone Age Painting in India by Romert Brooks

The arts of India from prehistoric to modern times by Ajit Mookerji (If you have no idea about Indian arts, START HERE; it's a short book full of illustrations)

Rajput painting : romantic, divine and courtly art from India by Ahluwalia, Roda

Indian Painting by C Sivaramamurti

South Indian Paintings by C Sivaramamurti

Approach to nature in Indian art and thought by C Sivaramamurti

[There are many books on Indian art, architecture and sculpture by C Sivaramamurti on Archive.org. It's basically a goldmine.]

Kalighat : Indian popular painting, 1800-1930 by Balraj Khanna

Art of modern India by Balrak Khanna [Again, you can check out other titles by Khanna.]

Indian Textiles by John Gillow

Traditional Indian Textiles by John Gillow

South-Indian images of gods and goddesses by HK Sastri

Myths and symbols in Indian art and civilization by Heinrich Zimmer (no illustrations)

The art of Indian Asia, its mythology and transformations by Heinrich Zimmer (with illustrations)

History of Indian and Indonesian art by Ananda Coomaraswamy

A Concise History of Indian Art by Roy C Craven

Deccani Painting by Mark Zebrowski

Indian Folk Art by Heinz Mode; Subodh Chandra

Women of India by Otto Rothfeld (this isn't about art but has few informative illustrations on regional costumes of women)

Dress And Ornaments In Ancient India by Mohini Verma and Keya Bawa

Classical dances and costumes of India by Ambrose, Kay

Cultures and Costumes of India and Sri Lanka by Kilgallon, Conor (o course i had to see other books on costumes)

Studies In Indian Painting by DB Taraporevala

Five Thousand Years of Indian Art by Hermann Goetz

Indian Painiting by Philip Rawson

The Art of Tantra by Philip Rawson

MS Randhawa (different books on Punjabi paintings Basohli, Kangra, Guler and General Themes in Indian Painting)

The imperial image: paintings for the Mughal court by Beach, Milo Cleveland

Wonders of nature : Ustad Mansur at the Mughal court by Dāśa, Aśoka Kumāra

Imperial mughal painting by Welch, Stuart Cary

Painted delight : Indian paintings from Philadelphia collections

India : life, myth and art by Ram-Prasad, Chakravarthi

The heritage of Indian art by Agrawala, Vasudeva Sharana

The adventures of Rama : with illustrations from a sixteenth-century Mughal manuscript

Indian paintings from the Punjab Hills by WG Archer

Art in East and West by Rowland Benjamin

Stella Kramisch (An American art historian and curator who was a leading specialist on Indian art, including folk art, for most of the 20th century. Also a Padma Bhushan awardee.)

The transformation of nature in art by Coomaraswamy, Ananda K

Books available on Libgen:

Art Of Ancient India : Buddhist, Hindu, Jain by Huntington and Huntington

The New Cambridge History of India, Volume 1, Part 3: Mughal and Rajput Painting

Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization by Heinrich Zimmer

Four Centuries of Rajput Painting: Mewar, Marwar and Dhundhar Indian Miniatures from the Collection of Isabelle and Vicky Ducrot

Ajanta by Yazdani

The Aesthetic Experience Acording to Abhinavagupta

TheHeritageLab is a free website to connect you to cultural heritage through stories, public engagement programs, campaigns, and free-access content.

Also if you're in Delhi, do consider getting a membership of Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) library.

Folk art:

Folk art is an entirely different area that deserve a post of its own. But i love them so here is a long list by Memeraki.com. You can Google each and then look more into what you like. This website also offers very cheap courses in traditional Indian arts by the hidden and disenfranchised masters themselves! It's doing a great work in giving them a platorm. I myself have taken the Mughal Miniature course here. You can consider it.

Illustrated Books:

Note: These are coffee table books with beautiful illustrations that you'd love to looks at.

The Night Life of Trees: In the belief of the Gond tribe, the lives of humans and trees are closely entwined. A visual ode to trees rendered by tribal artists from India, this handcrafted edition showcases three of the finest living Gond masters. THIS YOUTUBE LINK shows the making of the book. The channel also features other works of Gond art.

An Unknown Treasure in Rajasthan: The Bundi Wall-Paintings:  This book celebrates the surviving wall-paintings at Bundi by presenting a stunning photographic survey

Painting In the Kangra Valley: Painting in the Kangra Valley is an attempt to survey the painting styles of Guler and Kangra, which flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries. The painting activity began with Kashmiri painters (...)

Indian Painting: The Lesser Known Traditions: India has an astonishingly rich variety of painting traditions. While miniature painting schools became virtually extinct with the decline of aristocratic patronage, a number of local vernacular idioms still survive and continue to develop.

Madhubani Art: Indian Art Series: Madhubani art's origin is believed to go back to the ancient era of the Ramayana, when the town was decorated by inhabitants of the region for the wedding of Lord Rama and Sita with elaborate wall paintings and murals (...) Primarily a significant socio-cultural engagement for the womenfolk of Bihar, this art was a welcome break from their daily drudgery.

Reflections on Mughal Art and Culture: Enter the splendid world of Mughal India and explore its rich aesthetic and cultural legacy through fresh insights offered by 13 eminent scholars.

Monsoon Feelings: A History of Emotions in the Rain: Through a series of evocative essays exploring rain-drenched worlds of poetry, songs, paintings, architecture, films, gardens, festivals, music and medicine, this lavishly illustrated collection examines the history of monsoon feelings in South Asia from the twelfth century to the present

Sita's Ramayana shifts the point of view of the Ramayana - the saga of a heroic war - to bring a woman's perspective to this timeless epic. Illustrated with Patua painting.

Adi Parva: Churning of the Ocean: a graphic novel that is a revisionist retelling of some of our oldest tales which have inspired and guided generations of people.

Ajit Mookerji, Sivaramamurti and Craven Roy's books are concise from where one can begin and then delve deeper into the subject of interest. Reading history and myths behind the work for context and listening to music from the given time/region alongside will make the exploration even more enjoyable!

#indian aesthetics #indian art #master post of indian art #desi #desi culture #desi aesthetic #indian dark academia #indian art history #indian art history books #indian art books

[jamesdsass]

If I use the term “metaphysics” it is absolutely not in the sloppy equivocating sense of the term as thrown around by the so-called “New Age” movement or other arbitrary haphazard philosophical mishmash contemporary spiritual movements. I use the term in a strictly traditional sense that would be understood by adherents of Plato, Plotinus, Aristotle, John of Damascus, Thomas Aquinas, Shankara, Ibn Arabi, and as used by a handful of recent and contemporary thinkers such as Rene Guenon, Julius Evola, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Huston Smith, and Seyyed Hossein Nasr. The substance of what follows is taken from an email to someone explaining my position about 5 years ago.

In contrast to the relativism of the modern world, the foundations of Traditional metaphysics rests on the twin premises of absolute reality and our ability to comprehend it. The Traditional metaphysics of the "Perennialist School" is essentially identical to the doctrines of Advaita Vedanta, finding nearly identical parallels in Platonism, especially late Platonism embodied in the writings of Plotinus, Proclus, and others, and later manifestations often by way of absorption of late Platonic currents into the traditions of Islamic Sufism and to some extent Christianity (especially as preserved in doctrines in Eastern Orthodoxy), also essentially identical to the metaphysics of early Taoism.

The term "Metaphysics" is used here in the sense of "beyond the physical" in reference to the absolute in accordance with authentic traditional doctrines, rather than in the purely ratio-centric sense of post-medieval philosophy, and certainly not in the degenerate sense of post-19th century "Theosophy" and its various 20th century progeny, worst examples being the embarrassment of evolutionary "New Age" movements that proliferated from the counterculture movements of the 1960s. Although in some respects latter philosophers such as Martin Heidegger would brush close to Traditional Metaphysics, they would remain handicapped by purely secular academic parameters.

Being supra-human and supra-rational, the subject matter of metaphysics is largely only comprehensible and expressible by way of symbolic allusion and allegory. This, accompanied by its radically and strictly vertical orientation assures that pure metaphysics is not a realm open to everyone, rather those with higher intellective-noetic faculties or who have devoted the effort to cultivating them. This also places metaphysical doctrines above and beyond the realm of petty dialectic "debate."

Traditional metaphysics posits contrasting realms of unmanifest/manifest; uncreated/created; metacosmic/cosmic; divine/human. These realms are all potentially within human apprehension, and can be conceived in five levels of reality. The Divine encompasses the realm (1) Beyond Being, conceived as the Divine Essence and Supra-Personal God; and the realm of (2) Being, conceived as the Personal God, Creator, Judge, and abstract but attributable Divine Qualities. The realm of Manifest Existence is reflected in the human sphere as (3) Spirit or "Intellect" in the high traditional sense of the term, encompassing and comprehending the spiritual or angelic realms, hierarchically situated superior to the Soul (4) which correlates to the anemic or psychic realms, which is in turn similarly situated superior to the Physical Body (5), the corporeal or somatic realm. The realm of abstract Being (2) correlates to the Uncreated Logos. The realm of Spirit or Intellect (3) correlates to the Created Logos.

The categories of Absolute and Relative reality are bridged by the Metacosmic Beyond-Being (1) residing on the plane of the Absolute above, and within the realm of the Relative, we find encompassed the Metacosmic Being (2) respectively, with Spirit/Intellect (3), the subtle anemic/psychic realms of the Soul (4), and finally the gross physical realm of the Corporeal Body (5).

In traditional Vedic terms, Atma is the Divine Unmanifest Beyond-Being (1); while Maya encompasses the entire spectrum from Uncreated Metacosmic Being (2), Spirit/Intellect (3), the Soul (4), and the somatic Body and physical/sensual realm (5). In Abrahamic religious terms, the Earthly realm is that of the Body (5) and Soul (4); the Heavenly realm is that from the Spirit/Intellect (3) ascending to the Divine Unmanifest Beyond-Being (1). Only the physical Body (5) is subject to the vicissitudes of mortality, while the immortal realm encompasses the spectrum from the individual anemic Soul (4) to the Divine Beyond-Being (1).

Knowledge through higher intellection alone provides the superior vantage point and means of escape from the realm of change and becoming and from its inherent limitations. Without a principle from which it derives and which cannot be subject to it and is necessarily unchanging, change itself is meaningless and contradictory (and even impossible). The Unchanging is therefore the true object of principal or metaphysical knowledge. When knowledge attains to its object (the Unchanging) it becomes itself possessed of immutability. True knowledge (noesis or intellection) consists essentially of identification with its object. Knowledge arrived at through rational or discursive reason is imperfect because it is necessarily indirect "reflected" knowledge, therefore of a lower type.

Divorced from higher immutable principles, action becomes little more than ceaseless, unproductive, trivial agitation for incessant change at ever increasing speed, and dissipation into multiplicity and quantity. This is the most conspicuous trait of modern times - the degeneration into multiplicity, no longer unified by consciousness of higher principles, unmoored into ceaseless analysis driven to extremes, qualified by the in-aptitude for synthesis and the incapacity for any kind of concentration. In this respect matter is essentially multiplicity and division. For this reason, everything that derives from matter only begets strife and conflict between individuals and peoples.

Modern man has grown accustomed to this confusion, without self-awareness, seeing in it an exteriorized image of their own hyperactive fragmented mentality. In this state of mind there is no place for the changeless and permanent, they envision the whole of reality in 'becoming', thus repudiating true knowledge by implication, as well as the object of knowledge, namely transcendent and universal principles.

Relativism is both meaningless and an impossibility without grounding in the absolute, as change is meaningless and impossible without the unchanging, and multiplicity is without unity. The relativist position is an absurd self-contradiction, just as reducing everything to change culminates in the negation of change itself. These ideas have been playing out in the "Great Conversation" of the West at least since the times of Heraclitus - an "ancient" debate in our "modern" terms but encompassed very much within the spectrum of our own age by Traditional doctrines of cycles. The aberration of our times is that these absurd and patently self-contradictory ideas have attained dominance in the West.

The naturalistic denial of anything but "becoming" in our own times is an inherent denial of the existence of anything beyond the sensible and empirical, it is the negation of the metaphysical realm of immutable principles.

This is the consequence of the defacto amputation of "intellection" in modern times. Contemporary philosophers only acknowledge "intuition" of a completely infra-rational type. Medieval Philosophers, still operating for the most part within a Traditional worldview acknowledged the primacy of the Intellect in our sense of the term, even though this type of intellectual intuition of the Traditional order began to fall out of play as the doctrines degenerated and became purely "philosophical" in character.

The post-medieval rationalism, typified by Western philosophy following Descartes, is little more than the denial of this supra-human, supra-rational, and supra-individual faculty of intellection of the Traditional type. This renders "modern" or "Westernized" man incapable of understanding Traditional cultures, whether historical or contemporary, as long as he persists in ignorance or repudiation of intellectual intuition. People of traditional cultures suffer from the same handicaps to the degree that they have become "Westernized" in the sense of embracing the modern western rationalistic, scientistic, materialist worldview that denies any transcendent order.

This higher intuition, or intellection is immutable, infallible, and the only foundation and starting point for any development in conformity with Traditional norms. In Traditional culture, everything extends from this higher faculty of supra-human intuition and refers back to it.

James D. Sass