The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Chola bronze casters · a processional icon of Shiva dancing, in copper alloy, cast solid by the lost-wax process and finished by chasing, in the round · four arms, the right foot on a prostrate dwarf, the left leg raised and swung across the body, on a lotus pedestal within an encircling ring edged with flames, with lugs at the base for the poles by which it was carried · Chola, about the eleventh century · found at Tiruvalangadu, in the old Chola country north of the Kaveri delta, near Arakkonam · Government Museum, Chennai (Egmore), in its bronze gallery · scored as this one cast, the Tiruvalangadu Nataraja; the type, the image in worship at Chidambaram and the other Chola Natarajas, among them the Rijksmuseum’s in Amsterdam, are context
Mode
The South Indian processional bronze of the Saiva temple, cast to a fixed canon of attributes and measures, made to be bathed, dressed, garlanded and carried
Mythos
The dance of bliss at Chidambaram, by which the god creates, maintains, destroys, conceals and releases the world; the dancer as maker of the world, fire as the end of things, the circle as the cosmos, the god who treads down the demon
Phase
Chola, about the eleventh century, at or near the formation of the type in bronze; found at Tiruvalangadu; now in the Government Museum, Chennai, out of worship
Presentation
Copper alloy cast solid by the lost-wax process and chased, in the round; a figure on a lotus pedestal within a ring of flame joined to it, with lugs for carrying poles
Register
Grandeur held in stillness: a body in full motion, a face serene and level, the end of the world shown as grace
Scale
One body, one instant, one ring, at the scale of an icon made to be carried
Governing Proposition
A god dances on one bent leg, his foot on the back of a dwarf who is alive and looks up, the other leg swung high across the body; one upper hand holds a small drum and the other a flame, a lower hand is raised palm outward and the last swings across the chest to point at the lifted foot; his locks fly out to either side and meet a ring of fire that closes round him, and his face is calm. The wager of the image is that a whole theology, the world made, kept, burned, hidden and released in one motion, can be given as one balanced body in metal, every part a word in a sentence, and that the sentence can be carried out of the temple and still be read.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The bronze was found at Tiruvalangadu, in the old Chola country north of the Kaveri delta, near Arakkonam, and it stands now in the bronze gallery of the Government Museum in Chennai. The museum and the literature date it to the Chola period, about the eleventh century. It is a processional icon: a figure of Shiva dancing, cast solid in copper alloy by the lost-wax process and finished by chasing, on a lotus pedestal within a ring of flame joined to the pedestal, with lugs at the base for the poles by which it was carried out of the temple at festival.
The work scored is this one cast. The type it carries is older and wider. The dance of Shiva had been cut in stone relief under the Pallavas and the early Cholas, and the Pallavas had begun the tradition of bronzes made to be carried; the casters and patrons of the tenth century formed the dancing Nataraja in bronze. Many casts of the tenth to twelfth centuries survive, in Tamil Nadu and in museums in Delhi, London, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Amsterdam and elsewhere, and the image at Chidambaram is still in worship. All of them are context. The Tiruvalangadu cast is weighed for what it holds in itself, and it is not credited with what the type did before it.
It is the cast the literature most often sets at the head of the type, for the poise of the body and the integrity of the ring, and it stands near the formation of the type rather than after it. That placing is its strength and its limit at once. It is not the first such figure; it is the one in which the figure is surest. What follows asks what a cast made to a fixed canon can hold that the canon alone does not.
Movement II
The figure has four arms. The upper right hand holds the small hourglass drum, the damaru; the upper left holds fire on the open palm. The lower right is raised palm outward, the gesture that says “do not fear”. The lower left swings across the chest in the elephant-trunk gesture, the gaja hasta, the hand pointing to the raised foot. A cobra is about one arm. The god dances on the right leg, its foot on the back of a prostrate dwarf; the left leg is lifted and swung across the body. The matted locks fly out to either side, and in them are the small figure of the river Ganga, a crescent moon, a skull and datura flowers. He wears a man’s earring in one ear and a woman’s in the other, and a sash flies out with the locks.
None of it is ornament in the ordinary sense. The image is a sentence and each part is a word in it. Take away the drum and creation goes; the fire, and destruction; the raised palm, the protection of what is; the dwarf, the ignorance that is overcome; the lifted foot and the hand that points to it, release, which is the image’s promise. The drum and the fire are held at one height, at the two ends of one axis, so that making and unmaking are a single gesture of one body. The god who burns the world is the god who says “do not fear”, and the same figure points the way out.
The dwarf is not a defeated enemy lying still. He is alive under the foot and looks up, and the god stands on him: ignorance as the ground the dance is danced on, a weight stood upon rather than an enemy fought, and part of the balance. What does yield to subtraction is the density of the jewellery, the number of flames on the ring and the detail of the sash, which a cast can vary without loss. Everything that means is required.
Movement III
The figure’s knowledge is its balance. The whole weight rests on one bent leg on the dwarf’s back, and the mass of metal holds a pose a dancer can hold only for an instant. Every part is a counterweight to another: the swung leg to the planted one, the drum to the fire, the raised palm to the pointing hand, the locks flying left to the locks flying right. The ring closes about all of it, and the hands touch its space at their reach, so that the dancer and the world have one boundary, and the centre of the circle is the dancer’s navel.
The torso is modelled smooth and alive, the waist narrow, the shoulders broad, the planes of the chest given by light rather than by line. The flying locks are separate strands of thin metal set out level in the air and joined at their tips to the ring: a feat of casting, and the only measure of speed in a still figure. In relief against a wall the ring was a frame; in the round it is a world, and the figure is seen from every side. Bronze lets the locks and the sash stand free where stone would need support, the lost-wax process lets the fluency of the wax become metal, and the solid cast gives a carried god his weight.
The canon has its costs, and they are visible. The ornament and the flames are chased to a pattern and repeat. The face is idealised to the type rather than invented by a particular hand. The measures that guide the maker also bind him, and the form itself could be carried by another cast without loss of what it knows. What distinguishes this cast from routine ones is not a new idea but a surer poise, a truer ring and a body more alive.
Movement IV
The dance is the dance of bliss, the ananda tandava, by which the god creates, maintains, destroys, conceals and releases the world. The bronze does not allude to it; it is built of it. The drum and the fire are the two ends of time, the ring is the bounds of the world, the dwarf is the ground of forgetting, and the foot is lifted toward release. The archetypes are among the oldest anyone has made: the dancer as maker of the world, fire as the end of things, the circle as the cosmos, the god who treads down the demon.
Against all that motion the face is serene, almost withdrawn, the eyes level. The body is in full movement, the locks flung out, the sash flying, the leg swung high, and the face does not move. That is where the image rises: calm at the centre of a world being made and burned, the end of the cosmos shown as grace, the figure an apparition in a frame of fire. Because it was in the round and was carried, by lamplight in the dark of the temple and out in procession, the effect was renewed from every side.
What the image says can be stated and holds: that the world is a rhythm rather than a thing, its existence the continuance of a dance that could stop. It holds outside the faith that made it, and people who know nothing of the Tamil hymns read it rightly. Yet the theology was formed before the bronze, in the poets and the temple, and the bronze gives it its fullest shape more than it uncovers it. It shows the cosmos more than the human condition inside it: no family, no labour, no city, no history but the myth’s, and no person but the god.
Movement V
The bronze was made to be used: bathed, dressed, garlanded and carried. In the museum it is none of these, and the procession, the festival and the temple community, the human order it lived in, are gone from it. How it came through the centuries between the Chola period and its finding is not known. Its form is reported whole, the ring and the attributes standing, and bronze is the most durable of its materials. The form it carries has never left worship: the Chola Nataraja has been the image of Shiva in the Tamil country for a thousand years and is cast still to the same canon at Swamimalai.
Beyond its country the type became, through Coomaraswamy’s essay “The Dance of Shiva” of 1918 and through Rodin’s writing on the Saiva bronzes, the emblem of Indian art in the West; in 2004 India gave a Nataraja to CERN, where it stands. The questions stay open: whether the ring is the flame of the cosmos, the arch of the shrine, the fire of the cremation ground or the round of the drum’s sound; whether the five acts are the bronze’s own programme or a later reading; what the dwarf is; how the dance at Chidambaram relates to the dance carried from temple to temple. This cast’s own reach is narrower than its type’s: canonical in scholarship, an exemplar more than a source.
The desk sets it level with Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa at 8.9, the nearest devotional sculpture, and a tenth above Donatello’s David at 8.8, the nearest cast bronze in the round. The Ajanta Caves stand at 8.4, the Riace Bronzes at 8.2 and the Indus Valley Dancing Girl at 7.6. The Brihadisvara Temple, the Chola royal temple of the same decades and of the same god, stands at 9.0 by the orders a temple and its city hold, which a single figure cannot; Eliot’s Four Quartets, a poem of a dance at a still point, stands level at 8.9. In the gallery the god still stands on one foot within his ring, the drum and the fire held level, his face at rest.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged attribute by attribute, the figure resists subtraction almost everywhere. Take away the drum and creation goes; the fire, and destruction; the raised palm, the protection of what is; the dwarf under the foot, the ignorance overcome; the lifted foot and the hand that points to it, release, which is the image’s promise. The ring cannot go: it is the bounded world in which the dance happens and which the hands touch at their reach. The flying locks are the speed of the dance, the only measure of motion in a still metal figure. Removal fails at nearly every point, because the iconography is a sentence and each part a word in it. What yields is ornament: the jewellery, the count of flames, the detail of the sash.
Score: 9.0 / 10
What can be stated and holds: that making and unmaking are one motion, the drum and the fire held at one height in one body; that the world is a rhythm rather than a thing, its existence the continuance of a dance that could stop; that the god who destroys is the same who says “do not fear” and points to a way out; that ignorance is not an enemy fought but a weight stood upon, still alive under the foot. This is meaning, not mood, and it is disclosed through the image alone; it is read rightly by people who know nothing of the Tamil hymns. Held below the top because the bronze gives an already formed theology its fullest shape more than it uncovers it, and what it discloses is the cosmos more than the human condition within it.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The elevation is real and of a rare kind: grandeur held in stillness. The body is in full motion, the locks flung level, the sash flying, the leg swung high, and the face is serene, almost withdrawn, the eyes level; that contradiction is the height, calm at the centre of a world being made and burned. The ring of flame makes the figure an apparition in a frame of fire, and the raised foot, weightless, is the moment the dance seems to hold. Terror and beauty are one image: the end of the cosmos shown as grace. The height recurs from every side, because the figure is in the round and was carried, renewed in procession and by lamplight. Held below the top because it is one figure at one scale, and its register, however deep, is one.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing throughout. The dance of bliss at Chidambaram, by which the god creates, maintains, destroys, conceals and releases the world, is not alluded to by this bronze: it is its structure. Every part is a station in the myth, and the composition is the myth’s geometry: the drum and the fire at either end of one axis, the ring the bounds of the world, the dwarf the ground of forgetting, the foot lifted toward release. The archetypes are among the oldest and widest: the dancer as maker of the world, fire as the end of things, the circle as the cosmos, the god who treads down the demon. The particular stays particular where it matters most, in a dancer’s weight on one foot and a face. Held below the top because an icon stands near the archetype itself, and the particular person is thinner here than in a narrative work.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The inheritance is the Pallava and early Chola dance of Shiva in stone relief, and the processional bronze tradition the Pallavas began. The swerve of the type was great: the dance freed from the wall into the round; the ring of fire set about it, so that the figure carries its cosmos with it; the posture of the dance of bliss fixed for bronze; the god made portable, to go out among the people at festival. But that swerve belongs to the casters and patrons of the tenth century who formed the type. This cast takes the type at or near its formation and perfects it: the poise surer, the ring truer, the body more alive. That is mastery inside a fixed canon, governed by measure and commanded by the temple; it risked nothing, and was not meant to. A wager placed on a path being proven holds it lowest of the gated five.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Substitute a different form and nearly everything goes. The knowledge is the figure’s balance: a body on one foot inside a closed ring, the four hands touching the ring’s space at their reach, so that the world and the dancer share one boundary. In relief, against a wall, the ring is a frame; in the round it is a world, and the figure is seen from every side as it was in procession. In bronze the locks and the sash stand free, level in the air, a speed stone cannot hold without support. The lost-wax process lets the fluency of the wax model become metal, and the solid cast gives a carried god his weight. Painted, the image teaches the iconography; only the bronze lets the dance stand and be carried. Held a step below the top because the type, not this cast, is the form’s author.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Evidence over promise: about a thousand years in worship and more than a century of argument in the modern literature, and the yield is not exhausted. The open questions are of meaning. Whether the ring is the flame of the cosmos, the arch of the shrine, the fire of the cremation ground or the round of the drum’s sound; whether the five acts are the bronze’s own programme or a later theology read into it; what the dwarf is, ignorance, the ego, forgetting, or a demon of epilepsy; how the dance at Chidambaram relates to the bronze dance carried from temple to temple; what the image means outside the Saiva cult, where it has been read as a picture of the physical universe. The bronze yields on return in poise and proportion. Held below the top because the debate turns on one programme of attributes, its core settled by tradition.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The field is South Indian bronze and the Saiva image in the eleventh century. The intrinsic force is high and in part borrowed: the cast is among the fullest realisations of the type that reorganised the Indian image of the god, making a theology into one figure and fixing it, but the reorganisation belongs to the type’s formation, a step before this cast. The reach of this particular cast is narrower than the type’s, canonical in scholarship, an exemplar more than a source; credited for the type, discounted for the cast. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the Chola Nataraja the image of Shiva in the Tamil country for a millennium and cast still to the same canon at Swamimalai; the emblem of Indian art in the West through Coomaraswamy’s essay “The Dance of Shiva” of 1918 and through Rodin’s writing on the Saiva bronzes; a Nataraja given by India in 2004 standing at CERN.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about a thousand years. Form: reported whole, the figure, the dwarf, the four attributes, the locks and the ring standing, all that carries the meaning; no condition report was consulted, and no loss is charged that cannot be named. Presence: the bronze was made for use, bathed, dressed, garlanded and carried, and it has been withdrawn from worship into a museum, which takes from it the procession and the dressing, a use that was part of the work; how it survived between the Chola period and its finding is not known. Against that, the form it carries has never left worship, and the image is now read across the world. Fabric: bronze, the most durable of its materials; patina and the wear of ritual handling are ordinary. Charged a little for the lost use and the gap in presence.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Command of lost-wax bronze, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the dance stands because the casting holds it. The whole weight rests on one bent leg on the dwarf’s back, and the figure balances, a mass of metal in a pose a dancer can hold only for an instant. The torso is modelled smooth and alive, the waist narrow, the shoulders broad, the planes of the chest given by light rather than by line. The flying locks, separate strands set out level and joined at their tips to the ring, are a triumph of casting, thin metal held in the air. The four hands are articulate in four gestures, and the ring is true. The costs: ornament and flames chased to a canon and repeated; the face idealised to the type; a measure that constrains the maker as much as it guides him.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the serene face at the centre and the dwarf under the foot at the base, or the drum and the fire at the two ends of the upper axis. They obey one law, rhythm in balance. Every part is a counterweight to another, the swung leg to the planted one, the drum to the fire, the raised palm to the pointing hand, the locks flying left against the locks flying right, and the ring encloses it all in one circle whose centre is the dancer’s navel. Nothing stands outside the law: the dwarf is part of the balance, the god’s support as well as his enemy. The range is wide in meaning, from creation to destruction and from ignorance to release, and narrow in kind: one body, one instant, one material. The law governs completely; the narrowness holds it below the top.
Score: 9.2 / 10
The orders held: the sacred, as the whole content; the cosmos and its time, made and unmade in one motion; the natural order, in fire, river, moon, serpent and flowers; consciousness, in ignorance trodden and release offered, the work’s deepest claim; and the body, the instrument of all of it, man and woman in the two earrings. They are integrated: one balanced figure in one ring places each, and the dance binds the cosmos to the body. What holds the axis at the foot of the twelve, level with the swerve, is what is absent: no family, no labour, no city or state, no history but the myth’s, no person but the god. The temple community, the procession and the festival, the human order the bronze lived in, are outside the figure, and in the museum they are gone. That is the choice of a single icon, and the mark describes the form.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Imperishable at 9.3, then The Archetypal Deep, The Made and The Inner Law at 9.2. A knowledge that is the figure’s balance, a dancer on one foot inside a ring that is his world, which only the bronze in the round can hold and carry; a form whole at about a thousand years whose type has never left worship; a myth that is the structure and not the allusion; a casting that holds a pose a dancer can hold for an instant and sets the locks free in the air; and one law of rhythm in balance from the face to the dwarf.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve and The Encompassed at 8.2. The first is the honest charge of a canonical cast: the type’s turn from relief to the round belongs to the tenth century, and this cast perfects it inside a fixed canon, risking nothing. The second is what a single icon leaves outside: the sacred, the cosmos, the natural order, consciousness and the body held as one, and no family, labour, state or history but the myth’s. Then Pressure on Tradition at 8.7: the type’s reach is vast, the cast’s own narrower. The three are one fact: the type made the turn, and the cast holds it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 9.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.3, The Made at 9.2, The Inner Law at 9.2, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one of five: The Imperishable at 9.3, The Archetypal Deep at 9.2, The Unconcealment at 8.8 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.2 falls three tenths short, the turn of the type being made before this cast and the cast perfecting it within a fixed canon. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it covers falls below The Swerve at 8.2, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 106.8, an average of 8.90 that displays 8.9, in the Canonical tier, a tenth short of the 9.0 that the summit requires; were the aggregate higher, The Swerve would still hold the work in Tier IV.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the Chola Nataraja and its iconography, which is known securely and in detail, and of this cast from photographs and from its standing in the literature, not from measurement or a technical report; where a particular of the cast is given, it is that of the type as this cast carries it. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is one cast: the Tiruvalangadu Nataraja, Chola, about the eleventh century by the museum’s dating and the literature’s, in the bronze gallery of the Government Museum, Chennai (Egmore). The type, the image in worship at Chidambaram, the Rijksmuseum’s Nataraja in Amsterdam, the other Chola Natarajas of the tenth to twelfth centuries and the Pallava and early Chola reliefs of the dance are context; the type is weighed where it bears on this cast, and the cast is not credited with the type’s formation. The form is reported whole, with its ring and attributes; no condition report was consulted, and any loss or repair is unknown and is not charged. The one title quoted, “The Dance of Shiva” (1918), is Coomaraswamy’s; “do not fear” is the sense of the raised hand, not a quotation. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the cast’s dimensions and height, the temple at Tiruvalangadu from which it came, the circumstances and date of its finding, how it survived the centuries before, and the year of Rodin’s writing on the Saiva bronzes.