Named for two primary motifs in Buddhist art, the sacred bodhi tree and the protective snake, Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India is the first publication to foreground devotional works produced in the Deccan from 200 BCE to 400 CE. Unlike traditional narratives, which focus on northern India (where the Buddha was born, taught, and died), this groundbreaking book presents Buddhist art from monastic sites in the south. Long neglected, this is among the earliest corpus of Buddhist art surviving, and among the most sublimely beautiful. An international team of researchers contributes new scholarship on the sculptural and devotional art associated with Buddhism, and masterpieces from recently excavated Buddhist sites are published here for the first time―including Kanaganahalli and Phanigiri, the most important new discoveries in a generation. With its exploration of Buddhism’s emergence in southern India, as well as of India’s deep commercial and cultural engagement with the Hellenized and Roman worlds, the definitive study expands our understanding of the origins of Buddhist art itself.

Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press
 

Exhibition Schedule:

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
(July 21–November 13, 2023)

National Museum of Korea, Seoul
(December 22, 2023–April 14, 2024)

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• Two hundred lithographs that comprised a famous late nineteenth-century drawing course
• Introduces the work of a hitherto neglected master: Charles Bargue
• Of interest to artists, art students, art historians, and lovers and collectors of art

The Bargue-Gérôme Drawing Course is a complete reprint of a famous, late nineteenth-century drawing course. It contains a set of almost two hundred masterful lithographs of subjects for copying by drawing students before they attempt drawing from life or nature. Consequently it is a book that will interest artists, art students, art historians, and lovers and collectors of drawings. It also introduces us to the work and life of a hitherto neglected master: Charles Bargue.

The Drawing Course consists of three sections. The first consists of plates drawn after casts, usually of antique examples. Different parts of the body are studied in order of difficulty, until full figures are presented. The second section pays homage to the western school of painting, with lithographs after exemplary drawings by Renaissance and modern masters. The third part contains almost 60 académies, or drawings after nude male models, all original inventions by Bargue, the lithographer. With great care, the student is introduced to continually more difficult problems in the close observing and recording of nature.

Charles Bargue started his career as a lithographer of drawings by hack artists for a popular market in comic, sentimental and soft-porn subjects. By working with Gérôme, and in preparing the plates for the course, Bargue was transformed into a spectacular painter of single figures and intimate scenes; a master of precious details that always remain observation and never became self-conscious virtuosity, and colour schemes that unified his composition in exquisite tonal harmonies. The last part of the book is a biography of Bargue, along with a preliminary catalogue of his paintings, accompanied by reproductions of all that have been found and of many of those lost.

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