was promulgated, in 1730, by Fray Juan de Ayala, a monk of the order of Mercy; and such subjects are discussed as the shape of the true cross; whether one or two angels should sit on the stone by the sepulchre? and whether the Devil should be drawn with horns and a tail?  In the National Gallery of London there is a painting of the Holy Family by Benozzo Gozzoli, and Sir Charles L. Eastlake has permitted me to see a contract between the painter and his employer A.D. 1461, in which every figure is literally “made to order,” its attitude bespoke, and its place in the composition distinctly agreed for.  One clause, however, contemplates progress, and binds the painter to make the piece his chef-d’oeuvre—­“che detta dipentura exceda ogni buona dipintura infino aqui facto per detto Benozzo.”]

Hence even the most modern embellishments in the temples have an air of remote antiquity.  The colours are tempered with gum; and but for their inferiority in drawing the human figure, as compared with the Egyptians, and their defiance of the laws of perspective, their inharmonious tints, coupled with the whiteness of the ground-work, would remind one of similar peculiarities in the paintings in the Thebaid, and the caves of Beni Hassan.

Fa Hian describes in the fourth century precisely the same series of subjects and designs which are delineated in the temples of the present day, and taken from the transformation of Buddha.  With hundreds of these, he says, painted in appropriate colours and executed in imitation of life, the king caused both sides of the road to be decorated on the occasion of religious processions.[1]

[Footnote 1:  Foe Koue Ki, ch. xxxviii. p. 335.]

Amongst the most renowned of the Singhalese masters, was the King Detu Tissa, A.D. 330, “a skilful carver, who executed many arduous undertakings in painting, and taught it to his subjects.  He modelled a statue of Buddha so exquisitely that he seemed to have been inspired; and for it he made an altar, and gilt an edifice inlaid with ivory."[1] Among the presents sent by the King of Ceylon (A.D. 459) to the Emperor of China, the Tsih foo yuen kwei, a chronicle compiled by imperial command, particularises a picture of Buddha.[2] The colours employed in decorating their temples are mixed in tempera, as were those used in the ancient paintings in Egypt; the claim of the Singhalese to the priority of invention in the mixture of colours with oil, is adverted to elsewhere.[3]

[Footnote 1:  Mahawanso, ch. xxxvii. p. 242.]

[Footnote 2:  B. li. p. 7.]

[Footnote 3:  See the chapter on the Fine Arts, Vol.  I. p. 490.]