Hindagala

At the rock temple of Hindagala, in the hills above Kandy, survives one of the very few bodies of painting to come down from the Anuradhapura age. Scholars place it in the later centuries of that age, close enough to Sigiriya that some read the two as near contemporaries, which would set it somewhere between the sixth and eighth centuries.

Where Sigiriya gives celestial women, Hindagala gives a sacred scene, a gathering read as the Buddha preaching in the Tushita heaven, and it counts as the largest surviving painting of the classical era to take the Buddha himself as its subject. Much has faded, and the reading of the scene has been argued over, yet its importance is settled: it is a rare thread back to the painting of the early island, in a country where almost nothing of that painting has lasted. As at Sigiriya, the artists are anonymous.