Sep 17, 2008

Yakshini Anadyomene or Indians in ancient Egypt


The legend next to this wonderful Gulbenkian piece (about 6 inches in height) calls this small faiance fragment in Egyptian blue, perhaps the most moving work in the Egyptian room, Venus Anadyomene ("Venus Rising From the Sea"), which, the wikipedia says, "was one of the iconic representations of Aphrodite, made famous in a much-admired painting by Apelles, now lost, but described in Pliny's Natural History, with the anecdote that the great Apelles employed Campaspe, a mistress of Alexander the Great, for his model." Here is one:

(Venus Anadyomene, Museo alle Terme, Rome)

I believe the authors are mistaken and the piece is really an Indian Yakshini. My evidence is three fold: first, the fat fold on the belly, this kind of loving rendition of body fat being a feature of Indian but not usually Greek female statuary; the busy Indian necklace (Greek Venuses did not bathe with jewelry on); and her typical Mathura pose called the tribangha or 'pose of the three bends', bent at the hips, waist, and breasts (sometimes with the head cocked), to provide an S like shape; and one not at all typical of any known bathing Venuses. (In fact, the position of her shoulders suggests that her one hand once held a branch of a tree while the other rested on her hip; thus she is possibly shalabhabjika, or, as a website describes the genre, 'a woman so devastatingly beautiful that she makes trees blossom merely by touching them with her foot'). (See an article here).


(Yakshi, Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill)

That there should be Indian art in Roman Egypt ought not to surprise since India and Egypt enjoyed during Roman times brisk trade by way of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. An Indian Yakshini, in ivory, was found in Pompeii and is today in the Archeological Museum in Naples:

(Pompeii Yakshi, Museo Archeologico, Naples)

The uniqueness of the Gulbenkian piece appears to lie in it having been made in Egypt (the evidence for which is the blue glaze) but to an Indian model.

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Sir G said...
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