6 ideas
The Indian image-maker does not work from a model in front of him but first visualizes the deity in yoga-like concentration, guided by a verbal description (dhyana mantra) that fixes its pose, attributes, and gestures. The mental image is the real original, and the stone or bronze is a copy of that inner form, not of a living body.
Asking whether a traditional image is lifelike judges it by a standard it never aimed at. An icon succeeds when it correctly embodies its prescribed form and meaning, so a many-armed figure or schematized face is accurate to its specification, not a failure of observation.
The silpa sastras fix measurements, units, postures, and attributes for each type of image, and deviation from them makes an image unfit for use in worship. Beauty is located in conformity to the canon rather than in individual invention, and the artist's freedom operates within that given form.
A traditional image works like a text or diagram: its hand gestures, attributes, colors, and posture are a vocabulary that points beyond itself to a meaning. Seeing it well means reading what it signifies, not admiring surface resemblance, so iconographic literacy comes before aesthetic response.
Coomaraswamy separates two senses of 'imitation': copying how things look, and making a thing according to its intelligible form or idea. Traditional Asian and medieval European theory, from Sanskrit treatises to Aquinas and Eckhart, holds art to be the second kind, so the maker's knowledge of the idea, not their skill at mimicry, is what gives a work its truth.
Drawing on rasa theory, Coomaraswamy argues that the reward of art is a contemplative tasting of meaning in which the viewer recognizes the form the artist realized, not a pleasure in sensory stimulus. The modern cult of personal expression and of art as decoration for enjoyment is a departure from this, not the norm by which older art should be judged.