Rowland Amaravati Sculpture

The President and Fellows of Harvard CollegeHarvard Art Museum

Amaravati SculptureAuthor(s): Benjamin Rowland, Jr.Source: Bulletin of the Fogg Art Museum, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Nov., 1936), pp. 2-7Published by: The President and Fellows of Harvard College on behalf of Harvard Art MuseumStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4301010 .

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BULLETIN OF THE FOGG ART MUSEUM

BULLETIN OF THE FOGG ART MUSEUM HARVARD UNIVERSITY

VOLUME VI NOVEMBER, 1936 NUMBER I

Published in November and March, in 1936-37, by the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Price, twenty cents a copy,forty cents a year. Mail orders should be addressed to the Editor. Sent to all Friends of the Fogg Art Museum without charge.

CONTENTS

The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 2

Amaravati Sculpture BENJAMIN ROWLAND, JR. 2

Recent Books, etc. 7 Some Illustrations by Pierre-Antoine

Quillard in Portuguese Books ROBERT C. SMITH, JR. 8

Two Daumier, Drawings BERNARD LEMANN 13

Lectures, Exhibitions, Accessions I7

THE CHARLES ELIOT NORTON LECTURES

Professor Johnny A. E. Roosval, of the University of Stockholm, is to give the Nor- ton Lectures this year. His subject is "The Poetry of Chiaroscuro," and there will be eight lectures beginning in November. He is the author of many works on the mediaeval art of the North, and was called to Princeton in I929 to deliver the Kahn Lec- tures, later published under the title of "Swedish Art."

The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry, founded in I928 by C. Chauncey Stillman, of the class of I 898, for the purpose of bringing to the University men of inter- national eminence in literature and art, has included among its recent lecturers T. S. Eliot, Laurence Binyon, and Robert Frost.

AMARAVATI SCULPTURE

A marble slab originally forming part of one of the stone hedges or Buddhist railings that invariably girdled the relic mounds or stupas in early India now forms one of the most interesting exhibits in the Oriental Collection of the Museum (Figures iA and iB). Although nothing definite is known of its provenience, the character of the style and stone immediately place it in the region of Amaravati, the site of numberless Bud- dhist monuments in the great days of the kings of the Andhra Dynasty. Another sec- tion of the same railing, in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, is said to have been found at Goli in Guntur District. The most notable remains from this region are the magnificent fragments of the great tope at Amaravati now divided between the Government Museum, Madras, and the British Museum in London.'

Although the earliest Buddhist sculptures in Southern India, notably the slabs from Jaggayyapeta, were carved as early as the second century B.C., the period of flores- cence began in the second century of our era under the inspiration of the great preacher Nagarjuna and probably continued on into the era of the Imperial Guptas. In the fourth century, with the rise of Hinduism, Buddhism and Buddhist art ceased in South India. Drawing their inspiration from the school that grew up at Mathura under the patronage of the Kushan Dynasty, the later sculptors of Amaravati, taking the typically Indian models of the ateliers of Mathura, created what was in many ways the most sophisticated and exquisite style in the whole history of Indian art. Except for a few con- ventions to be mentioned later, almost all traces of the bastard style of Graeco-Roman art that flourished in Gandhara have disap- peared, and there emerges a delicately sensual, vitally articulated canon of beauty that is essentially Indian. The languorous, somewhat attenuated figures swaying with the beauty of flowers mark the last stage toward the evolution of the Indian ideal in the Gupta period. If the carved fables at Sanchi represent the healthy, robust adolescence of

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FIGURE I A

LEFT - SCENE FROM THE VIDHURA PANDITA JATAKA (?) RIGHT - THE ELEPHANT NALAGIRI

RELIEF FROM AMARAVATI DISTRICT

Indian art, the work at Amaravati is the final languid expression of an exquisite civili- zation, already as complete and consum- mately rounded as the artistic production of the Gupta Age, - the prelude to the techni- cal virtuosity and the dictates of the esoteric form of revived Hinduism, that clothed the mediaeval temples with a luxuriant growth of sculpture and remained to the last the mannered parody of the Indian Renaissance.

The canon of the human form with broad shoulders and wasp waist and shapely taper- ing limbs was that of the images of the Mathura school, the ideal prescribed in the Indian manuals of aesthetic procedure, the silpa sastras. The Amaravati figures with their attenuated, indolent grace are a re- finement of the somewhat coarse and sensual concept of beauty evolved by the Kushan sculptors of Mathura. One should compare the figure of Chakravartin in our relief (Figure xB) with the statue of a naga from Chhargaon in the Museum at Muttra, where we have not only the same pose but the basis for the sophisticated modelling of the Andhra sculptures.2

Almost all the authorities to write on the Amaravati sculptures have hinted at the possibility of a classical influence not only in the

composition of the reliefs but also in the treatment of the individual figures. Cer- tainly even in the damaged panel of the VidhuraJataka (Figure iA) the form of the horse projecting diagonally from the back- ground suggests the illusionistic devices of Roman relief and such Byzantine deriva- tions from Roman work as the Barberini diptych.3 The possibility of artistic contact with the West is supported by the evidence of Roman trade settlements in Southern India. The Peutinger Tables give a temple of the deified Augustus at Muziris; great hoards of Roman coins have been found not only in the Malabar and Chola regions but in the neighborhood of Amaravati. The closest analogy between Roman and Indian art is to be found in the deep undercutting at Sanchi and in the Constantinian reliefs; this is not a satisfactory parallel, however, since this technique was evolved in India centuries before its independent develop- ment in Rome. There is, however, a striking similarity to Roman work in the fondness the Amaravati sculptors had for complicated and un-Indian arrangements of figures in several planes. Certain reliefs from Nagar- junikunda are so strongly Western in feeling that, despite the arguments to the contrary

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FIGURE I B

LEFT - A CHAKRAVARTIN RIGHT - SCENE FROM THE NAGA CHAMPAKA JATAKA (?) RELIEF FROM AMARAVATI DISTRICT

by Bachhofer and others,4 it seems almost necessary to assume a connection with the art of Gandhara if not with Rome itself.

The subjects of our relief, by comparison with other fragments from Amaravati, may be determined with some certainty. At the extreme right we have the first part of the story of Buddha's encounter with the elephant Nalagiri, - the maddened pachy- derm rushing through the crowd trampling men under foot and hurling people aside with his trunk (Figure iA, right). The story seems to be completed in a panel with the submission of the elephant in another part of the same frieze in the Boston Mu- seum. These two panels together duplicate the composition contained in a single panel of a relief from Goli, now in the Government Museum, Madras.5

The next scene (Figure i A, left) cannot be identified with certainty. It seems most tempting to find here and in its counterpart in London an episode from the Vidhura Pan- dita Jataka, possibly the meeting between the Yaksha Purnaka and the nagini Irandati (Figure 3).6 The Vidhura Jataka deals with the story of the sage Vidhura. On be- ing told of the sagacity of this holy man by her husband Varuna, the naga queen

Vimala, becoming desirous of listening to the discourse of the ascetic, feigns a longing for the actual heart of the sage. Her daugh- ter Irandati offers her hand to any man or deva who will procure for her the object of her mother's desire. On the Himalayan height where she sings her song the nagini is approached by the Yaksha Purnaka. On learning from her and Varuna of the conditions of her marriage, he betakes himself to Vaisravana, who advises him to gamble with Dhananjaya for the jewel in which may be seen the worlds of men and gods. The Yaksha plays and wins, asking for a prize the minister Vidhura. After trying vainly to kill the sage, Purnaka conveys him to Varuna's court, where one and all are so impressed by the wise man's speech that he is returned to Indrapranpha; Purnaka re- ceives Irandati as his bride. The composition of the panel recalls the representation of this encounter in Cave 2 at Ajanta, where Purnaka, leading his horse as in the reliefs in Cambridge and the British Museum, ap- proaches the damsel and her companion.7 The Yaksha with his faithful charger, sur- rounded by court ladies and hosts of devas, appears again in another Ajanta fresco in the same cave.8 In the upper portion of the

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FIGURE 2

SCENE FROM NAGA CHAMPAKA JATAKA

RELIEF FROM GREAT STUPA, AMARAVATI

BRITISH MUSEUM

(Courtesy of R. B. Fleming and Co.)

relief in Cambridge may be made out a group of divinities such as surround the Yaksha in the representation of this story at Bharhut.9

The third panel (Figure iB, right) shows a scene from the Naga Champaka Jataka with the Naga Raja entertaining his bene- factor, the King of Magadha (Figure 2).10 The relief may represent the conclusion of the episode when the latter, vanquished by the Angas, plunged into the river where the Naga Raja welcomed him in his palace. There is a possibility, too, that it may represent the portion of the Jataka when Champaka, venturing into the world of man to keep the Sabbath, was spellbound by a snake charmer who forced him to dance. Unwilling to exercise his destructive powers and thus break his Sabbath vows, the naga king submitted to these indignities until, having been brought to perform before the king Ugrasena, his wife interceded with the monarch, and, in gratitude, Champaka en- tertained the king in his palace.

The fourth panel (Figure iB, left), even in its worn condition, may be recognized as a familiar subject in the decoration of the Amaravati stupa (Figure 4). The principal figure is a Chakravartin or universal ruler represented with the seven symbols of his rank." In the version of this subject in the Fogg Museum, there may be recognized the elephant and the forms of the wife, the general, and the minister; the wheel, star, and horse have been obliterated. As in an early fragment from Jaggayyapeta and a panel in the British Museum, Chakravartin is represented with his right hand raised to the heavens and showering gold.12

In the procession of beasts below the frieze may be recognized forms belonging to the sphinx-chimaera family, which, spawned in that homeland of monsters, the deserts of Mesopotamia, spread with the so-called "animal style" to the furthest reaches of Asia. These beast motifs are borne along by currents, mysterious in their movements,

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in the great ocean of art forms that, from the earliest historical periods, covers ancient Persian, Gandhara, India proper, boundless Scythia, and China. The exchange of these and other motifs, passed from hand to hand by nomad tribesmen and traders almost like articles of barter along the ancient arteries of commerce, is one of the most fascinating problems in the history of the relations between East and West in the ancient world.

In style as well as in the disposition of the carving, this slab and the related fragment in the Boston Museum seem most closely related to the sculpture that once decorated the base of the great tope at Amaravati and of a smaller stupa discovered at Goli.13 The same frieze of running animals appears and the separate episodes are framed by similar bosses. The completely mature, elaborate style is that of the fourth or last period of Amaravati sculpture of the third century A.D.14 This group of late sculpture related to our relief is dated ca. 200-300 A.D., by a fragment from Amaravati itself with an in- scription in the Gupta alphabet of about 300 A.D. and by the tradition that names a certain Rajah Mokunte of the early third century as builder.

BENJAMIN ROWLAND, JR.

Notes

1 Fergusson, J., Tree and Serpent Worship in India (London, 1873).

2 Bachhofer, L., Early Indian Sculpture (Lon- don, I929), II, pl. 97.

3 Compare also the reliefs at Taq-i-Bustan: Sarre, F., Die Kunst des Alten Persien (Berlin, 1922), Taf. 87.

4 Annual Bibliography of Indian Archaeology (Leyden, I927), pl. vi. For the appearance of classical motifs as late as the eighth century in Eastern India, see Vogel, J. Ph., 'A Remin- iscence of Classical Art in the Sculptures of Mamallapuram (Mavalipuram),' Etudes d'ori- entalisme a la me6moire de R. Linossier (Paris, 1932), II, p. 526; Bachhofer, p. I2I.

5 Ramachandran, T. N., 'Buddhist Sculp- tures from a Stupa near Goli Village, Guntur District,' Bulletin of the Madras Government Mu- seum, vol. I, pt. I (I 929), pI. InI, H.

6 The relief in London is illustrated by Fer- gusson, J., Tree and Serpent Worship (London,

1873), pl. xcvI, I; and in a drawing in Bur- gess, J., The Stupas of Amaravati and Jaggay- yapeta, pl. 50, i. Bachhofer has identified the subject of a similar panel in Madras as the meeting between Prince Siddhartha and his future wife Gopa.

7 Yazdani, G., Ajanta (Oxford, I933), II, pI. 4'.

8 Ibid., pl. 37- 9 Cunningham, Sir Alex., The Stupa of

Bharhut (London, I879), pl. xx, I8. 10 Vogel, P. H., Indian Serpent Lore (London,

I926), p. I5I, p1. vii b. " These are the elephant, the horse, wheel,

star, wife, minister, and general. See notes facing pl. v in Coomaraswamy, A. K., Elements of Buddhist Iconography (Cambridge, I 935).

12 Bachhofer, p1. I07, and Fergusson, pl. XCI3, XCV4, and Coomaraswamy, loc. cit.

13 Burgess, J., Report on the Stupas at Amara- vati and Jaggayyapeta (London, 1892), p1. XLII, 4, XLIII, 4, and LIV, 2, and Ramachandran, p- 39.

14 Ramachandran, pp. 2I-22.

RECENT BOOKS

BY MEMBERS OF THE FINE ARTS DEPARTMENT

AND THE MUSEUM STAFF

THE CRAFT OF THE JAPANESE SCULPTOR.

By Langdon Warner. McFarlane, Warde, McFarlane, and Japan Society of New York. 55 pages. 85 plates. $5.00. (August, I936.)

HARVARD PORTRAITS. Compiled by Laura M. Huntsinger, under the direction of Ed- ward Waldo Forbes, edited by Alan Bur- roughs. Harvard University Press. I58 pages. 34 illustrations. $2.00. (Septem- ber, I936.)

REPRODUCTIONS OF PAINTINGS. Edited by Arthur Pope, Professor of Fine Arts, and John Davis Hatch, Jr., Assistant Director of the Isabella Stewart Gardiner Museum. Harvard University Press. I47 collotype illustrations. Portfolio. $ I 0.00. (April, 1936.)

BOOKS ON ART, A Foundation List. Com- piled by E. Louise Lucas. Published by the Fogg Museum of Art. 83 pages. $2.00. (1936.)

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