Indian Sculpture c5.s2.t6: Veṅgī
Indian Sculpture c5.s2.t6
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Veṅgī
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The south expressed itself in ardent form. Amarāvatī was the centre of the school of Veṅgī (second century B.C. to third century A.D.). With the work of Jaggayapeṭa as precursor, with the work on, and connected with, the stūpas of Nāgārjunikoṇḍa, Alluru and Gumadidurru⁷⁴ as contemporaries, albeit of chiefly the later phase and with the reliefs of the stūpa at Goli among the last contributions, the school of Veṅgī, condensed within a circumscribed locality, has contributed a vast amount of sculptures. In the last two centuries B.C. (p. 34) the delicacy of the modelling, the slimness of the over-elongated limbs, the powerful character of the bodies, and with it all a sensibility and keenness of movement, were distinctly of local origin. Later, by about the first century A.D., a heavy and spreading plastic form in some reliefs⁷⁵ precludes linear fineness. This trend is fully unfolded in Nāgārjunikoṇḍa, in the second century A.D. and later, whereas in Amarāvatī it is disciplined in future and swayed by linear rhythms. From about A.D. 100 onward, influences from Mathurā had their chance. This can be seen in some of the Veṅgī reliefs, with stately figures of relatively round and heavy form and dispassionately postured (Fig. 42). But a tremor now seems to pass all through the most luxuriant bhaṅgas, when the artists of Veṅgī, their age of receptiveness being over, re-ascertain their own genius. By the middle of the second century A.D. another external factor was to leave its impress. Hellenism⁷⁶ reached southern India by way of trade. As also in the school of Mathurā, it was neither dully accepted nor was it misunderstood by the south Indian artists. It is significant that their interest was captivated, as a few reliefs show, not by Hellenistic anatomy and modelling but by the contrapost, the Hellenic tradition of carrying the weight of one's body. A novel sense of equilibrium was appreciated as affording further possibilities of movement, with their not wholly unrelated contrast to the tribhaṅga posture.
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With that autochthonous heritage and those northern Indian and other reverberations, in the second century A.D., the art of Veṅgī refined what it had come to inherit, and transformed it into the deadly beauty of life at its fullest.
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Buddhist subject-matter at this phase has changed its importance. Not that symbols as well as actual representations of the Buddha do not occur in plenty. But they do no more than this, for the breathless sway of the compositions does not halt before them. They are just part of it (Figs 47, 50). The scene of Māyā Devī’s dream, for instance, which in Bhārhut had been told so simply but exhaustively with the sleeping queen and the flying elephant, both of about the same size, in a bare room, indicated only by the presence of a narrow bed, a light and drowsy maid attendants, serves now an opportunity of exhibiting an opulent scene where the Buddha-elephant has no room; in one panel the Buddha-elephant in miniature edition is relegated to the border, while in another it is omitted altogether.⁷⁷ Miracles now are true because they are intensified instances of life. Accuracy of narration is not required. Assemblies and festival scenes (Figs. 49–51) are favourites with the school of Veṅgī. But equally significant with any of them is the frieze of the coping stone from Amarāvatī, an issue of the rambling lotus landscape of the Bhārhut type (Figs. 47, 48). There peace had been given the form of vegetative thriving, of an existence where there is room for all and none may feel his importance. Here the ‘lotus stalk’ has swollen to serpentine bulk, its threatening onrush, however, is merely the heavy weight of a twisted garland of many flowers and beads. It almost bursts the thick rings and elaborate plaques that help to clasp it, it almost crushes those who carry it, rush along with it in mad exhilaration and stop still defiantly and exhausted.
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The Bhārhut lotus creeper, with its bounteous stalk, had equally carried all. Now that this conveyance of the life-sap has expanded its movement means doom. There is no escape.
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The reliefs are deprived of nature, understood hitherto as co-ordinate existence of human figure, plant and animal, each of equal significance. Now the human figure itself is nature. Where perchance rocks, trees and water are shown, they indicate locality or their own symbolical meaning and help to fill the relief; artistically the trees, be they Bodhi trees or other, have mostly dwindled into inert signs of lost interest (Figs. 47, 50, 51, 53). But wherever the scene takes place it teams with human figures (Figs. 49–52). They sit, stand, dance and fly with the same abandonment.⁷⁸ They join their hands and it is a hymn and incantation to life that fleets they bend their bodies with heavy, heaving shoulders and willowy spine, with a tension that is beyond endurance but that will not break. They fly out of sheer elation, while stepping through the air and hovering in it horizontally. One of the favourite attitudes—and which would be outside the range of the Veṅgī artists—is a three-quarter view with the curve of the bent arm over-secting it, so as to preserve in most of the cases the integrity of the outline, while giving largest scope to a modelling that in its vibrations yields the most intimate pleasures of touch (Figs. 50, 51). As counterpart to the high tension of active movements (Fig. 52) there is the elegant langour of physical relaxation, from where this exalted sensuousness inexhaustively replenishes its strength (Fig. 49).
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Devices of inter-relation (p. 18) are taken for granted and are extensively used (Fig. 49). At the same time, however, experiments in over-secting and foreshortening (pp. 22, 40) have matured. They are made use of in parts only, like ornaments to enrich the composition (Fig. 47, extreme right with altar and wheel and a figure circumambulating the latter), with the whole gamut of the technique at the disposal of the craftsman. This is also the case in the representations of interiors, where the actually suggested limits of the room coincide with the depth of the relief.
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Here, too, for the first time,79 buildings visible almost totally, from two of their sides, according to the old formula, are treated as open pavilions, their roof or storeys supported by slender corner-pilasters only. They are filled with human figures, and thus set up a cube, a body-space so frequently employed in the later paintings of Ajaṇṭā.80
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The approach towards the dimension of depth, however, —it scarcely need be said—is not that of the eye and its illusion, but it is derived from a dynamic relatedness of volumes. This can be clearly seen in the reliefs where no indications of an actual room are given, but where a plain background delimits a group of figures (Fig. 47, extreme right and group round Bodhi tree). These, however, attitudinise in such a way that a shallow area results from being occupied by bodies turned at various angles towards each other and towards the ground.81 It is mostly built from the ground of the relief towards the front (p. 17 and also Figs. 49, 50; see, however, Fig. 51, lower part).
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The preferred appearance of the figures in their vigour and elegance is that of youth where it is nearest maturity. To complete by contrast and to paraphrase its accomplishment, in some compositions pot-bellied dwarfs, vainly endeavouring to outgrow their deformities, make a counterpoint of body-physiognomies (Fig. 48). This tension between the perfect and its opposite is not, however, only projected into separate figures, it is immanent in every single figure, with its sturdy body carried by limbs of an unearthly tread (Figs. 48, 50, 51). But the face as a spiritual physiognomy is yet unknown. There is no enlightenment, no liberation, in any of them. It is still, as it had been during the whole of early classical sculpture, but a part of the body, now so expressive of its passion, fatigue and elation.
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So far did early classical sculpture go, so utterly steeped in the body, that the mastery of its modelling seems to come from within (Fig. 52). The tangible vibrations of living flesh are the surface movements of deeper stirrings. Such is the naturalism of Amarāvatī. Nothing, in spite of the surrender of either to the beauty of the body, could be less Grecian. This is one of the supreme and complete artistic forms of the soil and the mind of India; for ever, that is, as long as it is active and creative, outside salvation the body cannot escape from itself, yet it can help in the attainment of salvation and eventually it is plastically transmuted into its receptacle. (See next chapter.)
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In the second half of the second century A.D. the school of Veṅgī is at its height. Linear composition now has not only become more flexible, but has grown in the same direction and to the same degree as the movement of the single figures. From the days of Bhārhut onwards an ever-increasing use was made of the joints of the body in their pliability: as in the fettered shyness of Bhārhut postures (Fig. 27), in the slow sway of the Bodhgayā figurines (Fig. 19), in the vivacious experimenting with new movements and angles of posture in Sāñcī (Figs. 33, 34). These, by the end of the first century A.D.⁸² (‘Loṇaśobhikā’ relief, Mathurā), are rounded off into one sweeping boldness, that bends head against shoulders, shoulders against waist, supported by legs reciprocal in their crossed attitude to the body and surmounted by arms that continue the pattern of the body-rhythm (see also Fig. 42).
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In unison with the bodily movement, the outline in Bhārhut had been reticent in its flow (Figs. 26, 27), but it gathered momentum as well as sinuous continuity in the subsequent century (Fig. 32), and in the first century A.D. it reached an amplitude that seemed to distend the movement now to the right, now to the left, except for a diagonal composition, which held together the exuberant outline. In the second century A.D. the turn and bend of the neck matter much and the threefold flexion (tribhaṅga) of the figures becomes the favourite pose (Fig. 42). This may be seen in the Mathurā and in the Veṅgī school. But the latter, being more subtle and expressive, gives it a different scope.
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Hitherto the movements of the single figures were contained within the appearance and extent of the figure. Now, however, and nowhere in such degree as in the reliefs from Amarāvatī, the rhythmical, i.e. compositional or dynamic, movement of each figure seems to transcend its bodily movement. The compositional movement of an upraised arm, for instance, does not end at the tips of the fingers. On the contrary, surging along the legs and passing across a powerful body, with mighty chest and vigorous shoulders, the movement is thrown forth from there across the arms and beyond the physical reach of the figure (Figs. 52, 51, etc.).
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The dynamic movements of these figures transcend them; their sway, their curves and even the tremulous and disintegrating outline (Fig. 53), specially of the later reliefs from Veṅgī, are attempts at escape with the help of the body, and from its limitations.
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The linear composition of the relief panels, too, as a whole, in its preference for parabolic curves (Figs. 49–52), is dynamically open. However filled with figure the relief may appear, it does not solely rely (see Sāñcī) on crowded shapes that have accumulated within a given frame; their multitude is bound together by linear rhythm. This, however, has none of the satisfied recurrence, none of the composed conclusiveness, peculiar to Bhārhut. On the contrary its movement is left open; it just begins only within the given relief field, but transcends it dynamically.
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In the first century B.C. (Sāñcī, South gate) groups of figures had begun to be formed, but they were sprinkled into the density of otherwise inarticulate crowds (Fig. 33). Now, however, the entire linear composition comprises but one group, i.e. that of all the figures taking part in the scene of the relief (see also Sāñcī, West gate, War of the Relics). With as many subordinate groups as there are interests and actions binding the single figures together, the whole is swept by a major movement, which, with its parabolæ,⁸³ leaves open the entire constellation of any scene, futile in its ardour. The perfection of the Veṅgī school, incomplete, however, in its attempt to transcend the limits of the single compositions and of the body, with an intensified awareness of its vitality, has an eternal poignancy.⁸⁴
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In the third century the discipline of the late second century no longer checks a truly excentrical sense of movement. With a tremulous mannerism of modelling (casing slabs of stūpa of Amarāvatī, reliefs from a stūpa near Goli, etc.),⁸⁵ the highly-sophisticated school of Veṅgī dissolves (Fig. 53).
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Classical Indian sculpture experiences its early maturity in Mathurā in the fullness of sense-perception and enjoyment. In Veṅgī the intensity of this experience transcends the experience itself. While early classical sculpture had been based on, and rendered in, plastic terms, the infinite connectedness of all life and form, the later phase, on the self-same basis and with related means, seeks an escape from its very foundation, which cannot be avoided. The direction only alters.⁸⁶
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The pendulum of the attitude of the artist towards life has swung back. The oneness with nature in its extended aspects is now condensed and transferred into the human frame. This integration aggrandises the latter to superhuman dimensions and constitutes the notion, if not as yet the form, of the image (Mathurā). The other alternative is that it burdens or elates in order to transcend the human figure (Amarāvatī). In the sculptures of Veṅgī transcendentalism is rendered in terms of locality; the movement of figures and compositions exceeds their actual extension. Transcendentalism, in the sense of a transubstantiation of the body itself and within its frame, was expressed by subsequent generations of craftsmen.
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1. Character of form: Fullest plastic and naturalistic modelling.
2. Geography: Two centres: Mathurā and Veṅgī, while the contributions of the other provinces are brought up to date. Expansion of Mathurā idiom.
3. Chronology: Unfoldment of all the artistic faculties as part of a process of inflexion.
4. Inner meaning: (a) Hedonism of Mathurā and (b) transcendentalism of Veṅgī as alternatives of an experience of life which turns back upon itself.