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New Day Cafe: Early Buddhist Art at the Met [1]
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Date: 2023-09-04
There’s a show at the Metropolitan Museum that I plan on making a special trip for this fall. The show is called “Tree and Serpent”, and it features some of the earliest Buddhist art, works never before displayed publicly (at least not in this millennium).
A description from the New York Review of Books: www.nybooks.com/...
“In 2003 Indian archaeologists working on a remote hilltop in the southern state of Telangana uncovered a remarkable early Buddhist monastic complex. Phanigiri, “the snake-hooded hill,” had clearly been one of the most important Buddhist monasteries in India. All around were found spectacular fragments of sculpture, including substantial sections of elaborately carved ceremonial gateways and a torso now judged to be one of the masterworks of Buddhist art. Many of the statues had been dismantled and carefully buried in soft earth for their protection after the monastery was abandoned in the fifth century CE, and they were found in almost mint condition...
over the past few decades, more and more spectacular and extensive early Buddhist sites have begun to emerge from the region’s rich alluvial soils. In the 1950s excavations during the building of a hydroelectric dam at Nagarjunakonda yielded a series of temples and monasteries decorated with exquisite narrative sculpture carved in a style very similar to that of Amaravati. In the 1970s another remarkable stupa at Dhulikatta produced a further series of treasures. Kanaganahalli, a monastic settlement built on a bend of the Bhima River in northern Karnataka and excavated in the 1990s, turned out to be the richest of all, with a set of enormous relief sculptures, some five feet high, including portraits of local rulers and the earliest extant image of the great Buddhist emperor Ashoka. Together these new finds have completely transformed our understanding of the beginnings of Buddhist art. They have also revealed the importance of southern India in the diffusion of both Indian ideas and images across the Bay of Bengal to Southeast Asia.
Most of the art from these sites has never been publicly displayed in India; in many cases, the underfunded Archaeological Survey of India has yet to gather the resources to take objects out of storage in local godowns and to build proper museums for them. But now, in a remarkable coup, the Metropolitan Museum in New York has mounted ‘Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India,’ a groundbreaking exhibition of these newly discovered masterworks, as part of the largest show of Indian antiquities to travel to the West for several decades.”
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