The Development of Hindu Iconography c8.43

c8.43

A general remark, however, can very justifiably be made with regard to the earlier age limit of most of these canonical texts. If we fix the earlier limit of the oldest among them in the 2nd to the 4th century of the Christian era, we may not be far wrong; but then it is impossible for us to determine which among them are such, and it is a fact that some at least of the iconographic features of many of the Brahmanical divinities were based on the partially defined anthropomorphism or theriomorphism of their Vedic counterparts. This limit did not go further back than the early Gupta period. In a subsequent part of this book, it will be shown that the image-making activities attained a great impetus in the early centuries of the Christian era due to various causes, and images belonging to different creeds came to be made in large numbers. Different groups of artists entrusted with this task put their own experiments into writing not only for their own convenience, but also for the convenience of the generations of artists to follow them, and in this way grew up a vast mass of such texts which were being added to from time to time. Thus, images were first constructed according to the specific needs of the varieties of expanding creeds and then the rules for their making were gradually stereotyped; it is just like the evolution of a language and the various grammatical rules appertaining to it. The analogy can be drawn further; as in the case of the grammatical literature of a particular language, development of different schools can be noticed as the language progressed, so here also, with the growth of iconoplastic art in India, different schools of artists came to lay down varying rules for the making of same types of icons. I have already referred to the 18 Vāstuśāstropadeśakas mentioned in the Matsyapurāṇa and have also shown how this information is partially corroborated by the Bṛhatsaṃhitā of Varāhamihira. I shall here show further how this differentiation can first be noticed on the basis of iconometric texts, and how the name of at least one such school can be ascertained from Utpala’s commentary on a passage of Varāhamihira. Thus, Varāhamihira writes with regard to the measurement of the length and breadth of the face of an image in this manner—