South Indian Bronzes: A Historical Survey of South Indian Sculpture with Iconographical Notes Based on Original Sources c10.14

c10.14

Creation, preservation and destruction are equally the functions of the Divinity. His image may be now beautiful, now terrible—but is always suffused with “that living quality which transcends all limited conceptions of beauty and ugliness.” As Dr. Rabindra Nath Tagore has put it, ‘its beauty has a quality which overwhelms all the beauty of created things’ (*Samastha Viswēr rūp dobāna rūp*). The Indian conception of the Divine has uplifted the human form out of the realm of the merely physical and has transfigured it with a spiritual meaning. It will be futile therefore to contend that the statues of the Indian *sthapathy* fall short of the physical idealism of Greek sculpture or that they have transgressed the rules of human anatomy. The forms devised, and the generalised and sometimes conventionalised anatomy worthily represent the ideas they seek to express and are therefore appropriate for their purpose. At the same time they display some artistic values of a novel order.