A BLACKSTONE STELE OF LASKHMINARAYANA


NORTH INDIA, 10TH/11TH CENTURY19 1/4 in. (48.9 cm) high
|At the center of this near-complete composition, Vishnu and Lakshmi embrace each other. They stand together in elegant tribhanga poses, Vishnu drawing Lakshmi close to him with his left arm around her back, his left fingers unable to resist touching her fulsome bosom. Lakshmi bends her right knee to accommodate Vishnu's hip pressed against hers. She raises her head toward Vishnu with a charming smile, while he gazes at the viewer, offering darshan: a means for the viewer to receive the divine couple's blessings through eye contact. Flanking Vishnu's exquisitely carved lotus halo, diminutive figures of Brahma and Shiva sit on makaras, each holding attributes and offering boons. Flanking Vishnu and Lakshmi's legs are personifications of Vishnu's symbolic attributes, the chakra and conch. By their feet, devotees kneel with their heads and hands raised toward the gods. What empty space is left on the stele is ornamented with thinly incised crosshatches, making the composition's celestial inhabitants appear all the more polished. This stele's subject is Lakshminarayana, a composite of Lakshmi and Narayana, a common epithet for Vishnu. Discussing a contemporaneous sandstone stele from 10th-century Rajasthan, Cummins remarks that depictions of Lakshminarayana are one of few instances where we see Vishnu in the sensuous tribhanga pose rather than standing straight and erect (Cummins (ed.), Vishnu, Ahmedabad, 2011, p.80, no.14). She also points out that Lakshminarayana images offer rare instances of coupled images where a female Hindu goddess is depicted on the same scale as the male: "Where couples are so equally represented, they are to be worshipped together, as two halves of a whole." The present sculpture raises Lakshmi's lotus pedestal so that she is closer to Vishnu's height, without disturbing her beautiful proportions. This stele also represents their symmetrical relationship by Vishnu holding Lakshmi's lotus attribute, and Lakshmi holding Vishnu's conch. Both the present sculpture and the Brooklyn Museum example are carved in a style seen throughout North, Western and Central India in the 10th and 11th centuries, following the reaches of the Gujara-Pratihara empire. However, subtle stylistic differences such as the treatment of the god's necklaces and jewelry find even closer expression in sandstone steles of Lakshminarayana on the exterior of numerous temples at Khajuraho in Central India. Compare, for example, Lakshminarayana sculptures on the late-10th century Parshvanatha temple published in Deva, Temples of Khajuraho, 1990, vol. II, pl.48, p.446. The present stele is made from a black phyllite stone which was highly prized and imported from distant regions to be used for sculpture in a temple's interior. Other closely related examples in black phyllite depicting avatars of Vishnu are published in Ghosh (ed.), Fashioning the Divine, Chapel Hill, 2006, pp.102-3, no.12, and Cummins (ed.), op. cit., p.153, no.70. Provenance Private French Collection, assembled 1950-1970