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

CHAPTER
I
SOUTH INDIAN BRONZES
The earliest metal sculpture in South India is
closely related to the style of stone carving, just
as the Gandhara and Gupta bronze statuettes
are the counterparts of images of the Buddha in
stone [175-7]. A beautiful example of metal
work in the Pallava Period is a bronze statue of
Siva [255]. This figure represents a period when
the full possibilities of bronze as a medium for
fluid and dynamic expression had not been
realized. The image, as though lifted from a
relief at Mamallapuram, has something of the
static and rigid quality imposed by carving in
stone. It is the metal counterpart of the Durga
of illustration 237 and is filled with the same
vibrant feeling of self-contained ecstasy. This
figure is like a stone relief, confined to a very
few planes with the arms and scarves deployed
in semaphoric fashion to right and left. Unlike
the later bronzes it does not give the impression
of the form's embracing space and moving
freely in an unlimited ambient.
The final, and in many ways the finest, chapter
of Dravidian art is the history of metalwork
in southern India. The art of southernmost
India, the home of the Tamil race, has in historical
times been dedicated entirely to the
Hindu religion and, especially, to the worship of
Siva. The popularity of the great Yogin, at once
creator and destroyer, began in the eighth century,
when bands of Saivite holy men, real
troubadours of Hinduism, journeyed through
the country singing hymns with reference to
every shrine they visited. Their success in conversion
was so great that by the year 1000 all
traces of Buddhism and Jainism had practically
disappeared. 1
The South Indian metal images were made of
bronze with a large copper content, and the
method of casting them was essentially the cire
perdue or 'lost wax' process. 2 The South Indian
icons were made according to just such canons
of proportion as determined the forms of Buddha
statues of earlier days. The total height ofthe
statue in proportion to the number of thalams
or palms that comprised it depended on the
hieratic status of the deity represented. Likewise
three distinct poses were employed to
express the spiritual qualities of special deities.
These varied from a directly frontal, static
position reserved for gods in a state of complete
spiritual equilibrium, to poses in which the
image was broken more or less violently at two
or three points of its axis, a pose reserved for the
great gods personifying cosmic movement or
function. In addition to these poses there was
also, as in Buddhist art, a great repertory of
mudras, the enormously formalized and cultivated
language of gesture, in which the worshipper
might read not only the special powers
and attributes of the god, but also the particular
ecstatic mood or feeling that the deity personified.
Also rigidly prescribed were the types
of head-dresses and jewellery appropriate to the
deities of the Hindu pantheon.
Typical productions of the South Indian
school of the eleventh century and later are the
images of Siva saints. One of the most popular
of these is Sundaramurtiswami, whom Siva
claimed as his disciple on the youth's wedding
day. The example illustrated [256] is typical of
the personifications of this Hindu psalmist,
showing him as though arrested in sudden ecstasy
at the vision of Siva and his court. It will be
noted that the figure is cast in tribhanga pose,
which we have seen so many times in images
from the Sunga Period onward. It is the moving