The Tivanka Image House

The Tivanka image house at Polonnaruwa, raised by Parakramabahu the Great between 1153 and 1186 within the Jetavana group, takes its name from the great brick Buddha inside it, standing in the thrice-bent tivanka pose. Along its inner corridors runs the fullest surviving programme of narrative painting from the classical island, for it is the one image house at Polonnaruwa to keep the greater part of its original walls.

The scenes move through the Jataka tales, the accounts of the Buddha’s former lives, carried in bold outline and warm earth reds and ochres, filling the wall from edge to edge rather than standing as single icons, with ranks of celestial figures above. Parts were repainted in the city’s later years, so the surface holds more than one century’s work. Faded though it now is, it remains the high point of medieval Sri Lankan narrative painting, and its makers, like all who worked before the Kandyan age, are unknown to us.

Along the corridor the Vessantara Jataka unfolds at length, the story of the prince who gives away everything he has, down to his children and his wife, and above the narrative registers move ranks of gods and celestial beings, the divine audience of the tale below. The great standing Buddha within, some eight metres of brick and plaster, bends at the neck, the waist and the knee in the thrice-bent pose that gives the shrine its name.