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

262 THE GOLDEN AGE AND END OF BUDDHIST ART
Of greater aesthetic as well as iconographical
interest than the stone sculpture of Bengal in
the last centuries of Buddhist power are the
large numbers of bronze images found at
Nalanda and elsewhere [198]. Like the stone
images, they reveal a development reflecting
changes in the character of Buddhism from
Mahayana types to purely Tantric forms of
Saivite and Vaishnavite derivation. Many of
198. Bronze Buddha in abhaya mudra from Nalanda.
Nalanda, Museum
these images were exported for dedication all
over south-eastern Asia in the centuries when
Nalanda was in close touch with the Srivijaya
and Sailendra Dynasties in Malaya and Java.
Indeed, at one time it was uncertain whether
these metal statuettes were made in India or in
Java, so exact was the correspondence and so
large the numbers of examples found in the two
regions. 5
Some examples of Nalanda bronze images
appear to be close imitations of earlier types of
the Gandhara and Gupta Periods, and it may
well be that some of these were specifically intended
as more or less faithful replicas of famous
images venerated at the holy sites of Buddhism.
The vast majority of them, like their stone
counterparts, perpetuate the Gupta style of
Sarnath. They are characterized by the same
kind of stylized elegance and fondness for
precise definition of detail that characterize the
stone figures. This finicky and often 'rococo'
manner is, of course, more suited to malleable
metal than stone. It is on the basis of the Pala
style of metal imagery that the whole of later
Nepalese and Tibetan sculpture is founded;
and there are indications that this manner was
also translated to Kashmir.
2. NEPAL
As has already been noted, the last phase of
Buddhist art in India has enjoyed a prolongation
of nearly a thousand years in the Himalayan
regions of Nepal and Tibet. For this reason it
seems logical to deal with this aspect of pro-