Pulligoda Galge

In a rock shelter at Pulligoda Galge, some three kilometres south of the monastery of Dimbulagala, a single painted fragment holds five haloed figures seated together on a broad lotus throne. Four sit in devotion, the fifth raising a garland in both hands, all of them ringed with the necklaces, armlets and bracelets of beings at worship, laid on a thin lime ground in white, yellow, red, green and brown.

The dating has divided the scholars who have looked at it. Vincent Smith and Ananda Coomaraswamy read it as seventh-century work; R. N. De Silva agreed on the seventh century while allowing a case for the fourth; Senarath Paranavitana argued only that it must predate the twelfth, which leaves room for a later, Polonnaruwa-period hand. An early Brahmi inscription cut at the same site carries the shelter’s use back further still, to the centuries around the turn of the era. The painters, here as everywhere in the classical record, went unnamed.