South Indian Bronzes: A Historical Survey of South Indian Sculpture with Iconographical Notes Based on Original Sources c10.15

c10.15

To the ordinary spectator the first feeling which is produced by the contemplation of such images is the “strangeness of intellectual landscape” which hovers about these conceptions. The various forms of the images of Siva which these Indian *sthapathis* have communicated to bronze will leave the average modern spectator cold. Like some of the Egyptian sculptures they will appear “cruelly distant and strange, terribly remote and uncommunicative.” You feel that what you have seen *does not belong to your world* and that it is utterly and completely separated from you. It is not the tale of a “glorified ideal of human powers” which Hellas has told in its animated marbles. It is a peep into the Indian Olympus peopled with actual gods and super-human beings, *not* with the athletes from the gymnasium posing as deities. "It is the adoration of the unknown force which maintains the universal laws and which preserves the types of all beings; it is the surmise of all that in nature which does not fall within the domain of sense—of all that immense realm of things which neither the eyes of our body, nor even those of our Spirit can see"—(RODIN).