The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

THE GUPTA PERIOD 233
dedicated in the year a.d. 474, in the reign of
Kumaragupta, by a holy man named Abhayamitra.
Several other images donated by this
same monk bear inscriptions with the phrase
'made beautiful through the science of citra\
The term citra, usually applied to painting, may
be roughly translated as artistic expression and
is one of the first indications that we have that
the aesthetic properties of the icon were considered
as part of its effectiveness as a religious
image. The statue shows an even further
departure from any adherence to the style of
Gandhara than the Mathura Buddha in the
complete disappearance of any indication of the
structure of the folds of the drapery; it is as
though the mesh of strings typical of the Buddhas
of Mathura had fallen away, leaving the
Buddha clothed in a smooth sheath-like garment
that completely reveals the form of the
body beneath it. Another immediate difference
that strikes us is the position of the figure : in
marked contrast to the columnar rigidity of the
Buddhas of Amaravati and Mathura, the body
is slightly broken on its axis in a kind of
Praxitelean dehanchement, a device that imparts
a
certain litheness and moving quality to the
Sarnath type. Very possibly this is an adaptation
for Buddhist usage of the characteristic pose of
the Indian dance, the tribhanga, in which, it will
be remembered, the body is similarly broken on
its axis. It is perhaps not too bold to think that
this posture was intended to suggest to the
worshipper that the Buddha image was actually
moving or walking towards the suppliant, its
hand raised in the gesture of reassurance. Like
their counterparts at Mathura, the Sarnath
images are certainly composed according to a
fixed system of proportion; from what we know
of later compilations of the sastras in the Hindu
tradition, some such ratio as seven, or even nine,
thalams (the distance from brow to chin) to the
total height of the image would have been employed.
The ratio varied according to the
'stature' both physical and hieratic of the deity
to be represented.
In all the Buddhas of the Sarnath workshops
the planes have been so simplified that the
sculpture takes on an almost abstract character;
it is as though, by the very perfection and unbroken
smoothness of the subtly swelling convex
surfaces which compose the modelling of
the body, the sculptor strove not only for a
beautifully refined plastic statement of form and
volume, but for an expression of the ineffable
perfection of the body of the Buddha as well.