It is these frescos, which are considered as the most famous features of the Sigiriya complex. It does not only awaken the artistic sense of the visitors but also is a place, which visualizes the lost splendour and the grandeur of the ancient Sri Lankan dynasty.

The great tapestry of paintings at Sigiriya, the palace on the summit and the lion staircase, is all part of a complex ‘sign-language’ expressing royal power and ritual status.

These paintings also represent the earliest surviving examples of a Sri Lanka school of classical realism, already fully evolved by the 5th century, when these paintings had been made.

According to calculations the paintings belongs to the fifth-century A.D. It is found in a depression on the rock face more than 100 metres above ground level. Today if a visitor wants to reach to the paintings there is a modern spiral staircase.

It is believed that the paintings would have covered most of the western face of the rock, covering an area 140 meters long and 40 meters high. There are references in the graffiti to 500 ladies in these paintings. The remaining paintings are considered as the fragmentary survivals of an immense backdrop of that huge collection of paintings.

The painted band seems to have extended to the northeastern corner of the rock, covering thereby an area nearly 140 metres long and, at its widest, about 40 metres high.  

 In the surviving paintings it is depicted female figures preserved in two adjacent depressions in the rock-face known as ‘ Fresco Pocket A’ and ‘ Fresco Pocket B’ (three other depressions: ‘Fresco Pockets C, D and higher up the rock face, also contain patches of plaster & pigment and, in at least one instance, fragment of a painted figure). Traces of plaster and pigment elsewhere on the rock-face provide further evidence of the extent of the painted band. They represent apsaras or celestial nymphs, a common motif in the religious and royal art of Asia.

These figures of women are depicted as rising from clouds and are known as "the cloud damsels". They are depicted in three quarter profile. Shown in three quarter profile, the paintings have striking diversity in mood and personality, face and body, clothes and make-up. Flowers are used in profusion in their hair, in baskets and in various forms.

An important and largely unanswerable question is how the present figures related to the entire composition of the painted band extending across the rock-face. Their fragmentary nature and unusual dramatic location have led to the Sigiriya paintings being interpreted in a number of ways, sometimes quite fancifully.

The Sigiriya frescos have been the focus of considerable interest and attention in both ancient and modern times. The poems in the graffiti on the Mirror Wall, dating from about the sixth to the thirteenth or fourteenth century, are mostly addressed to the ladies in the painting, who seem also to have been studied and reproduced in the eighteenth century by the Kandyan artists who painted the Dambulla murals.

Antiquarian descriptions of the figures in the ‘fresco pocket’ date back to the 1830s. The first proper descriptions in the nineteenth century are based on the examination of the paintings by telescope.

The first person in modern times to find his way into the fresco pocket and come face to face with the paintings was an engineer named Murray of the Public Works Department. He made tracings, copied them in pastel and published a paper in 1891.

The first real study of the paintings, however, begins with the commencement of archaeological surveys at Sigiriya by Mr. H.C.P. Bell from 1894 onwards and the facsimile copies in oils made by Mr. Muhandiram D.A.L. Perera in 1896-7.

Of the proposals that deserve scholarly consideration, the three most important ones are those of Mr. Bell, Mr. Ananda Coomaraswamy and of Dr. Senerath Paranavitana.

 Mr. Bell’s idea that they portray the ladies of Kasyapa’s court in a devotional procession to the shrine at Pidurangala – a rock in the vicinity with an ancient temple – is considered as purely an imaginative reconstruction and has no precedent in the artistic and social traditions of the region or the period.

It seems quite likely, however, that the court ladies and their costumes and ornaments provided models for the Sigiriya artists and that, as such, the paintings reflect the life and atmosphere, the ideals of beauty and the attitude to women, of the elite society of the time.

 Dr. Paranavitana’s suggestion was that they represent Lightning Princesses (Vijju Kumari) and Cloud Damsels (Meghalata) is an interpretation at once more literary and sociological. It forms part of his elaborate hypothesis, which attempts to explain Sigiriya as an expression of the cult of divine royalty, the entire palace complex being a symbolic reconstruction of the abode of the God Kuvera.

While these identifications may seem to us today an over interpretation too specific to accept in its totality, deriving from Dr. Paranavitana’s attempt to see the Sigiriya palace and royal complex primarily as an expression of divine kingship, they do draw our attention to important sociological dimensions in the understanding of ancient works of art. There is no doubt that the spatial organization and symbolism of the Sigiriya complex is profoundly determined by the cult of the king and the ideology of kingship.

Mr. Coomaraswamy's identification of the Sigiriya women as Apsaras is in keeping with well-established South Asian traditions and is not only the simplest but also the most logical and acceptable interpretation. Recent studies have reinforced this idea, showing that apsaras are often represented in art and literature as celestial beings, who carried flowers and scattered them over kings and heroes as a celebration of victory and heroism.

We can say almost with certainty that the Sigiriya ladies are celestial nymphs, very similar in essence to their successors thirteen hundred years later in the ‘daughters of Mara’ panel from Dambulla, but it is also likely that they had more than one meaning and function: as expressions of royal grandeur and status and as artistic evocations of courtly life, with aesthetic and erotic dimensions.

Such an interpretation, with its varying levels of ambiguity, allows us to accommodate both Bell’s and Dr. Paranavitana’s suggestions at either end of a semi-logical spectrum. It also makes it possible for us to view the painted band at Sigiriya as a rare and early survival of a royal citrasala, or picture gallery, well known in Indian literature and implicit in the Culavamsa account of King Parakrmabahu’s palaces and audience halls at Polonnaruwa.

The style and authorship of the paintings have been controversial, a question as that of their identity. Early writers such as Bell, and even Coomaraswamy, saw them as extensions of the Central Indian School of Ajanta or of several related traditions such as those of Bagh or of Sittanvasal in South India. Bell even suggested that ‘artists trained in the same school possibly the same hands – executed both the Indian and Ceylon frescoes’. These were views expressed at time when very little was known of the extent and character of early Sri Lankan painting.

Mr. Benjamin Rowland was amongst the first to observe carefully the actual painterly technique at Sigiriya and to note in what specific way it differed from Ajanta and other sub continental traditions.

‘The Sigiriya paintings, outside of their exciting and intrinsic beauty, are perhaps most notable for the very freedom they show at a time when they were tending to become more and more frozen in the mould of rigid canons of beauty. The apsaras have a rich healthy flavour that in contrast almost makes the masterpieces of Indian art seem sallow and effete in contrast almost makes the masterpieces of more vigorous than that of the more sophisticated artists of India, so colours are bolder and more intense than the tonalities employed in the temples of the Deccan’ (Rowland 1938-84)

These insights have been pursued and reinforced by contemporary Sri Lankan scholars, who rightly argue that, while the Sri Lankan paintings belong to the same broad traditions of South Asian art as the various sub continental schools of the time, the specific character and historical continuity of the Sri Lankan tradition give it its own distinctive place in the art of the region.

Thus, the Sigiriya paintings represent the earliest surviving examples of a Sri Lankan school of classical realism and remain a living verdict for a legend that can evoke fascinating hallucinations in the viewers mind of King Kassapa escorting those pretty maidens, who even now encompass the ability to evoke estimable sentiments in our hearts.

                                                 Hansima Vitharanage