Hindu Sculpture

Images of the Hindu gods and goddesses appear in anthropomorphic (e.g. Trivikrama), zoomorphic (Matsya and Kūrma) or the two-in-one (Nsiṃha, Śarabhamūrti, Hanumat, Nandi). The present article reports few such rare iconographical forms relating to Adhikāra-Nandi, Hanumat, Vyāgrapāda, Saint Cuntarar’s effort to release a child from the womb of a crocodile and so on. These images are mostly from the art of Tamilnadu found in situ in the temples of Periyakuḷam, Tiruvoṟṟiyūr, Aḻakarkōyil, Tārācuram and the collections of the Museum Rietberg
Zürich. These images cover a long chronological sequence from the Later Cōḻa to Nāyaka or contemporary in Nāyaka mould. The significance of the images with due reference to Tamil literary
sources is attempted.

Religious representations discussed in this book origin from Mathura, well-known and important artistic center of North India. They may be numbered among the oldest cult stone sculptures that depicted gods of the Hindu pantheon. The author of the book selected images of Agni, Indra, Surya, Vishnu, Brahma, Vasudeva-Krishna, Sankarshana-Balarama, Rudra-Śiva, Skanda-Karttikeya and Ganapati-Vinayaka. Some of deities are of the Vedic origin, and the others were included in the Hindu pantheon as a result of the evolution of religious beliefs and incorporation of local and indigenous cults. Images of these gods are analyzed from the historical and religious perspective. Since most of them were depicted for the first time in Mathura sculpture, important part of the work is the iconographic analysis. The cult representations of this kind are significant for the research on the religious art sources. Finding a genesis of gods’ representations that were sculpted in Mathura, as well as origins of the elements of such representations, is fundamental in the analysis of this kind. In the comparative analysis the author included the oldest examples of the images of individual iconographic types. Further she took into account the relevant pieces of the literary tradition, and finally parallel depictions in the art past 4th CE. Besides, having carefully studied the sculptures forms and having included numerous examples of each type, the author could place objects representing particular type in a chronological order. The study is thus crucial both for dating the Mathura sculptures and for tracing the evolution of the Mathura style. (the book is in Polish)