Sigiriya

High on the western face of the rock at Sigiriya, in the reign of Kashyapa I between 477 and 495, painters set down the figures that remain the most famous images the island has made. Graffiti scratched on the Mirror Wall below, where visitors left more than a thousand verses between the eighth and tenth centuries, speak of some five hundred women on the rock; of these about twenty-two survive, the rest lost to weather and time. The figures, half-emerged from cloud, have been read as apsaras, as celestial nymphs, as a queen and her attendants, though their identity has never been settled.

What holds the eye is the drawing itself: the line laid in sweeping strokes, pressed harder along one edge so that each form swells into volume, a command of the body that little in the surviving art of its century matches. The hands that achieved it are unknown, and the record keeps no name for a single one of them.

The figures survive in a sheltered pocket of the rock face, worked on a dried lime ground rather than in true wet fresco, which is part of why their colour has held for fifteen centuries. The verses left on the Mirror Wall below are more than idle marks: written by ordinary visitors across those centuries, many of them addressed to the painted women themselves, they are reckoned among the earliest surviving Sinhala poetry, so that the rock keeps at once the island’s first great painting and some of its first written verse.