Sculpture: Entranced Anatomy

Only a century ago, a British archaeologist wrote with assurance: “There is no temptation to dwell at length on the sculpture of Hindustan. It affords no assistance in tracing the history of art, and its debased quality deprives it of all interest as a phase of fine art.” This pronouncement seemed to mean that 4,000 years of Indian sculpture was damnably hard to categorize, and that its frank eroticism dismayed Victorian minds. But today’s scholars are drawn to it as surely as bees to an orchid. Indian sculpture in the period from 2500 B.C. to A.D. 1500 is a hothouse wonder, an other-worldly idea clad in contemporary curves.

Fertility in Trees. The canons of Indian sculpture, unlike those of Greek, had little concern for scientific human anatomy. Their manuals of esthetic guidance, the śāstras, taught more how to reveal’ divinity than how to relate a latissimus dorsi. The Indian sculptor built up the contours of the body from intuition and from devotion. Art in India is religion, and India’s gods would have no existence on earth except for their portraiture. Now a selection of nearly 20 tons of sculpted divinity, collected by the Cleveland Museum of Art, is touring U.S. museums.*

Nature and the gods intertwine in Hinduism, India’s dominant religion, which makes trees natural-enough symbols of god-granted fertility in a hot, dusty country. But sculptors did not copy trees, even when they meant to depict them. Instead, the artists pursued a metaphysic that showed dryads called yakshis (see opposite page) embracing trees in a union of the soul and the divine. Bulbous breasts, swelling hips and crescent thighs are drawn more from the idea of fertility than from womanly shapeliness. If the sculptors made their female goddesses hyperana-tomic bombs, they were emphasizing perfection in divine terms.

Divinity as Beauty. Lips lift in a sublime smile, torsos twist into reverse curves that enliven flesh, and ornament clings to smoothly modeled skin like a caress of art given to nature. Beauty was a reflection of divinity, just as the slender saints that adorn Chartres cathedral are the disembodied spirits of medieval Christianity.

Indian sculptors were expected to identify with their art in a mastered state of trance. The image would then be the result of the sculptor’s ecstasy: his trance guided his chisel. All this seemed strange to Western man-unless he happened to recall that Fra Angelico knelt in prayer before he could begin his lustrous panels.

*Already seen at San Francisco’s M. H. De Young Memorial Museum and at the Seattle Art Museum Pavilion, the show travels on from Cleveland to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and from there to the Honolulu Academy of Arts.