KASHMIR, CIRCA 8TH CENTURY

Details

A rare green stone relief of Vishnu Chaturanana
Kashmir, circa 8th century
The standing figure with multiple heads and bearing the faces of his lion and boar avatars, holding a lotus and conch in his principal hands, the remaining hands radiating around him holding numerous attributes and flanked by diminutive figures of his personified attributes, Gadanari and Chakrapurusha, and with the Earth Goddess, Prithvi, emerging between his feet, dressed in a short dhoti with multiple necklaces and a long garland, the stone of gray-green color and carved with a rectangular opening on the reverse revealing the back of the body carved in the round
7¾ in. (19.8 cm.) high

Provenance

Private American Collection, acquired in the mid 1980s

Lot Essay

This stele represents a very unusual iconography of Vishnu with multiple heads, based on the four-headed image of Vishnu Vaikuntha or Chaturanana first emerging in the eighth century and that became synonymous with Kashmiri art. For comparison with the large three-headed Vishnu Chaturanana at the Sri Pratap Singh Museum, Srinagar, see P. Pal (ed.), Art and Architecture of Ancient Kashmir, 1989, fig. 20, p. 53; for a stylistically related figure of a four-armed Durga at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, carved from the same type of stone and dated to the 9th century, see ibid., fig. 10, p. 111.

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