Indian Sculpture c5.s1.t2: Plastic Quality
Indian Sculpture c5.s1.t2
- Language
- English
Plastic Quality
c5.s1.t2.1
Indus art had shown the tree, the animal and the human figure by the side of one another, or else interpenetrating each other. Indus art had pronounced this, but it had not completely expressed it in the medium of creative form. This the flowing linear rhythm of classical art facilitates. It divests the appearance of each type of isolation, it approximates the one to the other, by making the limbs of human figures not too different from the branches of trees, etc. (Fig. 15). Every part and all the figures are permeated by one and the same vitality, and this is carried from form to form by an inner rhythm that constitutes, together with the bodies through which it passes, the plasticity of Indian sculpture (Figs. 15–20, 24).
c5.s1.t2.2
An inner pliability bends and models the form. The paradox of the solid material (stone, etc.) and the fluid aspect of its artistic transformation make the high tension and complexity of Indian sculpture (Fig. 27). This may be called plastic. As an essential quality of classical Indian art it is not confined to sculpture, but is equally immanent in painting.³² Indian sculpture and painting are never merely decorative or ornamental. Their adaptations to a given surface and its equilibrium are by-products of the slighter kind in Indian art.
c5.s1.t2.3
Whereas it is the allurement of the illusionistic factor in Western art to break through the surface from outside with a deceptive display of space and depth, the temptation in Indian sculpture acts just from the other direction. A superabundant tendency of the plastic urge to swell into form from within the material does not easily brook limits imposed by anything except the extension of the material itself. Borders, neatly carved and decorated, are at times as, for instance, in Sāñcī and Amarāvatī³³ (Fig. 49), encroached upon and over-sected by a superabundance of figures, which will not acknowledge limits. In the case of reliefs carved in the rock, frames or regular limits need not exist at all, but the relief expands as far as the plastic impulse can throw it forth, bubbling with modelled form (Figs. 39, 74, etc.). The taming of this superabundance by limits and line is one of the tasks of this phase of classical sculpture.
c5.s1.t2.4
The fragment of the sorrowing woman from Sārnāth (Fig. 11) brings home this aspect more poignantly than the more exhaustive and somewhat later railing-reliefs from Bhārhut and Bodhgayā. That curve of the woman’s back encompasses the tender modulations of a young body. The heaviness of loin cloth, anklets and hair ornament, and the harsh stiffness of the resting leg, set off the delicate plasticity of the body. In spite of an unequal execution of the single parts, they cohere plastically. The outline as limiting, co-relative to the modelled surface, has accepted the part it is to play in classical sculpture.
c5.s1.t2.5
The enlargement and linear circumscription of the eyes of the burnt earthenware heads (Fig. 12), within a face relatively richly modelled, assigns to them a position stylistically between ancient and early classical art. The somewhat later faces from Bhārhut (Figs. 26 and 27) have not this far-seeing and wide-awake expression. Their flattened masks seem to disguise it.
c5.s1.t2.6
The majority of the sculptures of this period are reliefs. They belong to railings or gateways of stūpas, or they are rock-cut adornments of monasteries.