A MARBLE HEAD OF SHIVA, HINDU SHAHI, NORTHWEST INDIA OR GANDHARA AFGHANISTAN, CIRCA 7TH–9TH CENTUR

拍品描述

A MARBLE HEAD OF SHIVA, HINDU SHAHI, NORTHWEST INDIA OR GANDHARA AFGHANISTAN, CIRCA 7TH-9TH CENTURY Carved from a single block of white marble, the head rises from an unworked rectangular stump that would originally have been set into the body of a larger figure or a mukhalinga. The face is broad and softly modelled, with almond-shaped eyes half-closed in an inward gaze, arched brows meeting at the bridge of a straight nose, and full lips set in a composed expression. A vertical third eye is incised at the centre of the forehead. The ears are elongated with distended lobes, framing the face on either side. Above the smooth brow rises a tall cylindrical jatamukuta, its lower registers carved with parallel wavy striations to indicate matted locks gathered up into the coiffure, with a small topknot resting at the front. A crescent moon is set into the proper left side of the piled hair. The stone retains extensive earthen encrustation across the crown and around the neck, and the reserve block beneath the chin remains rough-hewn. The iconography is that of Shiva in his ascetic aspect. The tall jatamukuta identifies him as the yogin-god whose matted hair, wound up in the manner of a wandering renunciate, contains the celestial Ganga; the crescent moon fixed into the coiffure is the chandra, the lunar attribute worn by Shiva as Chandrashekhara, "he who bears the moon." The urna or third eye at the centre of the forehead marks the tryambaka, the three-eyed god whose inner vision surveys past, present and future, and whose opened third eye brings destruction. The half-lowered eyelids and the stillness of the mouth belong to the meditative register of Shiva iconography rather than to his terrifying or dancing forms, presenting the deity as Mahayogin, absorbed in interior contemplation. The type belongs to the sculptural tradition of the Hindu Shahi dynasty, which held territories across present-day eastern Afghanistan, Gandhara and the northwestern Punjab between roughly the seventh and the tenth centuries. Shahi sculptors worked principally in the fine white marble quarried in the region around Kabul and the Salt Range, a material whose crystalline surface takes a high polish and holds crisp facial detail. The choice of marble in this context is significant. It marks a decisive break from the grey schist that had dominated Gandharan Buddhist sculpture of the earlier centuries, and it announces the Hindu, and specifically Shaiva, character of Shahi devotional patronage on the northwestern frontier. The soft modelling of the face, the frontal symmetry, and the strongly vertical crown are all characteristic of the workshop conventions of the period, in which the residual classicism of Gandharan sculptural memory is absorbed into an emphatically Indic devotional idiom. Shaiva worship under the Shahis was centred on major temple foundations in the Kabul valley and at sites such as Gardez and Tapa Skandar, and marble heads and bust-length images of Shiva survive from a small number of related contexts, most now dispersed. The scale of the present head, and the fact that it emerges from an uncarved reserve rather than from a finished torso, is consistent with images intended either as the presiding face of a linga or as the head of a large standing cult figure, in either case for temple installation. The head exemplifies the mature Shahi marble idiom on the eve of its extinction: a sculptural language in which the ascetic gravity of Shaiva iconography is rendered through a serene, inward-looking face, and in which the imported prestige of white marble carries the visual weight of a new devotional regime across the old Buddhist geography of the northwest. Dimensions: Height: 60cm

图片