How was time conceptualized and represented in Indian art? Through case studies re-examining a few canonical examples in Indian art, from Sarnath Buddha, to Udayagiri Varāha tableau, to Ajanta’s Cave 26, this essay demonstrates that the carefully composed insertion of miniature human donor figures can be taken as a visual clue to understand how the sense of history and time was experienced and articulated in ancient India. By adjusting our view to the periphery of a visual program, we may recognize a previously unnoticed female donor figure on a famed fifth-century stone stele from Sarnath depicting Buddha’s first sermon. While we lack detailed historical information on such images’ production and use, a scale-oriented formal analysis of human figures along with the analysis of epigraphic and literary evidence can help appreciate an artistic strategy developed to capture multiple temporalities. The present study contends that the introduction of human body as a portal for collapsing multiple temporalities in one medium, i.e. sculpted religious image, developed in a cultural milieu in which political actors and artistic communities began to innovate strategies to collapse the distance between the narrative time and the lived, historical time.

中文翻译：

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阅读时间：鹿野苑大佛与中世纪早期南亚供者画像的历史意义

时间是如何在印度艺术中概念化和表现的？通过案例研究重新审视印度艺术中的一些经典例子，从鹿野苑佛陀到 Udayagiri Varāha 画面，再到阿旃陀的第 26 窟，这篇文章表明，精心制作的微型供体人物的插入可以作为理解的视觉线索历史和时间感在古印度是如何被体验和表达的。通过将我们的视野调整到视觉程序的边缘，我们可能会在来自鹿野苑的 5 世纪著名石碑上认出一个以前未被注意到的女性捐赠者形象，该石碑描绘了佛陀的第一次布道。虽然我们缺乏有关此类图像制作和使用的详细历史信息，对人物形象进行面向尺度的形式分析以及对碑文和文学证据的分析，有助于欣赏为捕捉多重时间而开发的艺术策略。本研究认为，将人体作为一种媒介（即雕刻的宗教图像）中的多个时间性折叠的入口的引入，是在一种文化环境中发展起来的，在这种文化环境中，政治行为者和艺术团体开始创新策略以缩小叙事时间之间的距离。和活生生的历史时间。