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Foundations of Oriental Art & Symbolism
In other places the two aspects of the divine Māyā are represented separately: the lionesses or leogryphs which prance along the pillars and niches symbolize her terrible aspect, while the young women of celestial beauty incarnate her beneficent aspect. Hindu art far surpasses Greek art in its exaltation of feminine beauty. The spiritual ideal of Greek art, progressively lowered towards a purely human ideal, is the cosmos as opposed to the indefinity of the chaos, and therefore the beauty of the male body, with its decisively articulated proportions; the supple and unified beauty of the feminine body, its richness here simple and there complex, like that of the sea, is missed by Greek art, at least on the intellectual plane. Hellenism remains closed to the recognition of the Infinite, which it confuses with the indefinite; not having the conception of the Transcendent Infinity, it catches no glimpse of it on the “prakritic” plane, that is to say, as the inexhaustible ocean of forms. It is not until the period of its decadence that Greek art becomes open to the “irrational” beauty of the feminine body, by which it is drawn away from its ethos. In Hindu art on the contrary the feminine body appears as a spontaneous and innocent manifestation of the universal rhythm, like a wave of the primordial ocean or a flower of the tree of the world.
Girl playing with balls, Nagda, Rajasthan, 11th century
Sculptures from the complex of temples at Khajuraho, Madhya Pradesh