Hindu Art - www.thespiritconnect.com

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Hindu art, unlike Buddhist art, shows the human figure curved, voluptuous and filled with potential motion. Parvati below is shaped and dressed (only in jewelry to emphasize her sexuality and a crown) like the Yakshi. Ganesha, the elephant-headed god in the center, is corpulent, the result of "good living." Vishnu on the right is portrayed with a fit, but soft body, and with four arms to show his many powers.

The Indian artist had an entirely different starting point. He considered that the perfect human animal was an inadequate symbol for the beauty of the divine nature which comprehended all human qualities and transcended them all. It was only by meditating on the Ultimate Perfection that the artist’s mind could perceive some glimmer of the beauty of the Godhead. Mere bodily strength and mundane perfections of form are never glorified in Indian art. Indian art is essentially idealistic, mystic, symbolic, and transcendental. The artist is both priest and poet. In this respect Indian art is closely allied to the Gothic art of Europe – indeed, Gothic art is only the Eastern consciousness manifesting itself in a Western environment. But while the Christian art of the Middle Ages is always emotional, rendering literally the pain of the mortification of the flesh, the bodily sufferings of the Man of Sorrows, Indian art appeals more to the imagination and strives to realize the spirituality and abstraction of a supra-terrestrial sphere.