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Yakshi with a Love Letter in Her Hand
India, ca. 11th-12th century
Buff sandstone. Height: 33 in. (84 cm)
Museum Associates Purchase. 67.37
While this figure with its extravagantly rounded volumes, elaborate jewelry,
and exaggerated serpentine pose makes a powerful impression when encountered
in the Museum, it was not a separate cult image, but a part of the very
fabric of the temple. In its plan and elevation, the temple is both a symbolic
diagram of the cosmos, and its actualization. The walls are thronged with
the richly carved forms of all the teeming delight and variety of the universe.
It is in this setting, warmed by the sun and shadowed by the projecting
enframements, that this feminine goddess regains her full power. She blossoms
from the vertical architectural wall surface to modulate and activate the
surrounding space. Her function is to embody fruitfulness and delight. She
is either a celestial maiden (Surasundari) or one of the Alasa-kanyas, the
indolent maidens whose grace and beauty make a heavenly palace of the temple.
This figure is carved in a style that was common in mid-India and Rajastan
during the tenth and eleventh centuries. It is a sustained exploration in
the power of roundness, with its entirely convex surfaces, and the deeply
exaggerated, continuous recessions from the frontal planes to the rear plane.
The precisely articulated units of jewelry and girdle also serve to emphasize
the softness and fullness of the figure.
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