Indian Sculpture c6.s6.t1.3

c6.s6.t1.3

The body may be thrown forward in an attitude of utmost vigour (figures below the upper left hand and below the right knee of Narasimha, Fig. 85), with a chest as if swelled from within by inherent power. But this pose has no artistic reality, for what matters is the negative, the concave curve of the back, ready for a burden of self-forgetting experience to be placed on it. The slender and rounded limbs are bent in sharp angles, and seem to split the linear composition into many fragments. Their joints act at the same time as so many centres where nervous energy is bundled up and from where it radiates to its next station. This is undergone with much grace of appearance, a discipline more easily assumed for its smoothness is inherited from the past, a dilution of the classical.