South Indian Bronzes: A Historical Survey of South Indian Sculpture with Iconographical Notes Based on Original Sources c10.10

c10.10

So in the Homeric hymns we find the same human interest is given to the gods, their sufferings and adventures. They had little about them of the mysterious or the unearthly. They were "human, all too human." The vocation of the Greek sculptors was not "to bring the people nearer to the gods—to the conceptions of the super-human, as in India—but to bring the gods nearer to the heart of the people by making their images in human shape". It must be remembered that the Dyonysian spirit or the philosophy of Plato had no influence in Greek sculpture. In fact in the plastic arts of Greece no attempt has been made "to peer through the shadows of the real things that which we do not see". The Indian outlook on life—as embodied in its religious philosophy, has been always a search for the infinite—a desire to escape the limitations of individuality, time and space. And naturally in the service of that religion Indian art and particularly Indian sculpture has used form "less for its own sake than as a manifestation of something more changeless and eternal". It was not possible for Indian art to create a type that captivates and charms: it was not sensuous. On the other hand it was essentially super-sensuous and curiously metaphysical, carrying the mind beyond the object represented to a world of abstract ideas—a world of mystery and exultation.