The Age of the Imperial Guptas c8.66

c8.66

The Daśāvatāra temple presents another new feature in its arrangement and decorative details of the three great niches containing the great bas-reliefs. Here we see for the first time the familiar Gupta *motifs* in actual use. Each niche is contained in a sunken panel formed by two uprights and a horizontal beam but most of the decorations, in all cases, go above this beam. In the case of the upright, the decorations running parallel to them, are continued in the interior but not outside. These uprights are pilasters of the familiar Gupta type : square at the bottom, plain in the lower half, bearing a narrow band of arabesque on an elevation at the bottom and the centre. In the upper half ornaments are more profuse and beginning with the three-quarters medallion containing a bas-relief it ends with a dwarf-foliated vase bearing a square abacus. Above this is a cruciform capital, partly Indo-Persepolitan in style, as below each arm one can see lions couchant in the approved and well-known method. The medallions of the pilasters contain in the case of the niche containing the great Śeṣa-śāyin, a four armed Gaṇeśa seated on the left and a two-armed figure on the right. Inside the area enclosed by these two pilasters there are two more uprights, a pair against each pilaster, both of which bear arabesque in the interspaces of meandering creepers, which is continued in the two lower bars of the lintel. A third bar is interposed below the real lintel, supported on cruciform capitals, and in this case also, the ornament is slightly variegated arabesque. On the great lintel itself, we see one of those extremely nimble artistic ideas executed in stone, consisting of a creeper with foliage, entirely unnatural, but which, somehow or other, looks very natural, with playful Amorini in the centre. Above the real lintel rises another tier with alternated sunken panels. It looks, from a distance, as if short uprights have been placed on the horizontal beam to support the sloping roof of a temple. The sunken panels bear niches or doorways carved in very shallow relief and the surface ones real lion’s heads or Kīrttimukhas. The sloping roof above is of the same shape as the Maṇḍapas (Jagamohanas) of early mediæval Orissan temples like the Paraśurāmeśvara¹ at Bhuvaneśvara or the twin temples at Gandharāḍi² in the Baudh State. A row of small dentils appear below the roof but over it is continued one of the principal architraves of the temple. It is brought over the roof of each of the niches by two advancing recessed corners. The ornamentations consist of a row of sunken panels, oblong in shape, containing niches in miniature and separated from each other by a number of flat pilasters bearing either, three long pilasters, or a mass of arabesque resembling small Acanthus leaves.