Beschreibung:

A BRASS FIGURE OF KRISHNAORISSA, 16TH/17TH CENTURY 9 1/2 in. (24.3 cm.) highFootnotesProvenance Acquired in the London art market, 1980s. Standing on one foot with the other nimbly poised to suggest he could begin dancing shortly, divine Krishna is shown playing his flute with which he lures village women out of their homes to engage in illicit, moonlit pastimes. In devotional literature, Krishna's attraction is described as magnetic and impossible to resist. Romantic love is used as a potent analogy for the relationship between the human soul and the Divine, the coupling of which is rapturous. In art, his sublime physical beauty is conveyed as a sensuous, shapely young man with long hair, epitomized by the present bronze. This solid-cast figure derives from Orissa in Northeastern India. A closely related, albeit later and less refined, sculpture of Krishna as an infant is held in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (M.87.124) and shows the same combination of a brass figure standing above a copper, chocolate-brown lotus pedestal.