Gupta Art and Architecture: Sculpture, Ajanta Paintings, Temples and Coins

Gupta Art and Architecture: Meaning, Period and Classical Features

What Is Gupta Art: Period, Patrons and Surviving Forms

Gupta art is the art of the Gupta Empire, which ruled most of northern India, with its peak between about 300 and 480 CE, and survived in a much reduced form until about 550. The period is regarded as the classical peak of north Indian art for all the major religions. Under Gupta patronage, Indian art attained classic perfection in human, animal and floral forms and set the standard of artistic creation for the centuries that followed.

The term is used broadly. It covers work from north and central India outside direct Gupta rule, above all the Deccan of the Vakataka dynasty (about 250 to 500), where the Ajanta caves were mostly made in this period. Most surviving works are religious sculpture, mostly in stone with some in metal or terracotta, and architecture, mostly in stone with some in brick. Painting was evidently widespread, but Ajanta is virtually the only large survival, and the fine gold coinage is the main survival in metalwork.

• Sculpture: Images of the Buddha, Vishnu, Shiva and the Jain tirthankaras from Mathura, Sarnath, Udayagiri, Eran and Deogarh.
• Painting: The murals of Ajanta and the Bagh caves.
• Temples: The first structural shrines, at Sanchi, Udayagiri, Tigawa, Nachna, Bhitargaon and Deogarh.
• Metal and terracotta: The Sultanganj Buddha, the iron pillar, and the terracottas of Bhitargaon and Ahichchhatra.
• Coins: The gold dinaras, the one art form that pictures the kings themselves.

Features of Gupta Art: The Classical Style

The Gupta style is known for its classical decorum. Deities of every religion are shown in a calm and majestic meditative style, and Hindu, Buddhist and Jain images share one style, a growing likeness of form that continued after the period. The main features of Gupta sculpture, clearest in the Buddha images, are these.

• Halo: Ornate halos with floral and gem motifs behind the head.
• Drapery: Thin, diaphanous robes that cling to the body.
• Face: Specific hair curls, meditative eyes, elongated earlobes, relatively thick lower lips and often three lines across the neck.
• Scale: Large, often near life-size figures of the major deities, Vishnu, Shiva and the Buddha; the main figure in a scene is many times larger than the others.
• Pose: Subtly tilted standing figures instead of the columnar rigidity of earlier images.
• New figures: The river goddesses Ganga and Yamuna on either side of doorways, and the main bodhisattvas, prominent in sculpture for the first time.

Religious patronage shifted as well. The dynasty favoured Vishnu, who now appears more often, where the Kushan rulers had generally preferred Shiva; yet the lingam remained the central image in most temples. Minor figures such as yakshis, prominent in earlier art, became smaller and rarer, and the crowded scenes of the Buddha's previous lives, the Jataka tales, became rare.

Gupta Sculptures: Mathura, Sarnath and the Hindu Image

Mathura and Sarnath Schools of Gupta Sculpture

Three schools of Gupta sculpture are usually recognised, at Mathura, at Varanasi and nearby Sarnath, and to a lesser extent at Nalanda. Each used a distinctive stone, which helps to identify the sculptures they exported to other parts of northern India. Kosambi also emerged as a centre.

Mathura remained the traditional main centre. Its sculptors used mottled red stone from Karri in the district and continued the traditions of Gandhara and Kushan art. Under the Guptas its pink sandstone images reached great fineness and delicacy, with an air of calm and serenity. The robe still shows its folds, and the halo is profusely decorated. The Mankuwar Buddha near Allahabad, dated 448 in the reign of Kumaragupta I, shows how far east the Mathura style reached.

Sarnath, near Varanasi, produced mainly Buddhist images in yellowish sandstone from the quarries of Chunar, without the foreign influences seen at Mathura. Folds disappear, and the robe covering both shoulders is so thin that it looks transparent; the halo carries very little ornament. Dated examples show that the mature style developed only by 450 to 475. The Sarnath Buddha set the image followed in eastern India and South-East Asia for many centuries, and was the origin of Buddha images in Siam, Cambodia and Java.

Hindu Sculpture: Udayagiri Varaha, Eran and the New Deities

The first dated sculptures in a fully developed early Gupta style come from the rock-cut Udayagiri Caves near Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh. Udayagiri is the only site that can be verifiably tied to a Gupta king through its inscriptions: one records the gift of a minister of Chandragupta II, and the caves were consecrated in 401 CE. More on the king is in Chandragupta II Vikramaditya.

The most famous work at Udayagiri is the relief in Cave 5, about 7 by 4 metres, of Vishnu as the boar Varaha. He rescues the earth, shown as the goddess Bhudevi clinging to his tusk, from the primordial waters, watched by rows of much smaller gods, sages and celestial beings. It is the iconographic centre-piece of the site.

• Eran: A large single column dated 484/5 by an inscription of Buddhagupta, with two Garuda figures at the top; also a huge boar on four legs, its body covered with rows of small figures of sages.
• Nachna: A Nataraja that appears to be the earliest image of the dancing Shiva.
• Khoh: An ekamukha Shivalinga, a linga with one face, now a masterpiece of the National Museum.
• Deogarh: Large reliefs of Vishnu reclining on the serpent, of Nara-Narayana and of Gajendramoksha on the temple walls.

Metal and Terracotta: Sultanganj Buddha, Iron Pillar, Ahichchhatra

Metal statues were probably about as numerous as stone ones, but almost none survive. The copper Sultanganj Buddha from Bihar, over life-size at 2.3 metres, is the only remaining metal statue of any size from Gupta art. Cast by the lost-wax process and dated between 500 and 700 CE, it follows the Sarnath style, with a very thin, clinging robe. It was found in 1861 during the building of the East Indian Railway.

The iron pillar now in the Qutb complex at Mehrauli, Delhi, is a feat of metallurgy. It is 7.21 metres high and carries an inscription of a king named Chandra, generally identified as Chandragupta II. It resists corrosion because an even protective layer forms on its high-phosphorus iron, a testimony to the skill of ancient Indian ironsmiths. It was probably first set up elsewhere, possibly outside the Udayagiri caves, and moved to Delhi in the 11th century.

Gupta terracotta is of very fine quality and even more uniform in style across the empire than the stone sculpture. Relief panels survive on the brick temple at Bhitargaon, and a pair of river goddesses from a temple at Ahichchhatra is 1.47 metres high. Terracotta figures have also been found at Mathura and Kaushambi; like the stone sculptures, they are notable for suppleness of movement, benign expression and perfect proportion.

Cave Paintings of Gupta Period: Ajanta and Bagh Murals

Ajanta Paintings: Caves, Patrons and Themes

Painting was a major art in Gupta times, and skill in painting, especially portraits, was a desirable accomplishment among the elite, including royalty. Only murals survive, and most of them are at Ajanta, 30 excavations cut into a horseshoe-shaped bend of rock above the Waghora stream, 107 km north of Aurangabad in Maharashtra.

• Two phases: The earliest caves, with fragments of painting in Caves 9 and 10, date from the 2nd century BCE; new excavation began again under the Vakatakas, contemporaries of the imperial Guptas.
• Patrons: Varahadeva, minister of the Vakataka king Harishena (475 to 500 CE), dedicated Cave 16, and Cave 17 was gifted by a prince who was a feudatory of the same king.
• Best-preserved paintings: Caves 1, 2, 16 and 17.
• Themes: Jataka stories, incidents from the life of the Buddha, and contemporary events and social life; the ceilings carry geometric and floral patterns.
• Sculpture: Cave 26, a large worship hall of the late 5th or early 6th century, has a carved reclining Buddha of the Mahaparinirvana.

The best-known painting is the Bodhisattva Padmapani in Cave 1, of the late fifth century CE. He holds a lotus, wears a big crown, and is shown with three bends in the body; soft modelling and outlines merged with the body give the figure volume. With Vajrapani on the other side, he is painted as a shrine guardian. The Mahajanaka Jataka in the same cave is the biggest narrative painting at Ajanta.

Ajanta lay in Vakataka, not Gupta, territory, but its paintings are thought to reflect the metropolitan Gupta style closely. The murals do not run in horizontal bands like a frieze; large scenes spread in all directions from a figure or group at the centre.

Ajanta Painting Technique: Why the Murals Are Not Frescoes

The painting technique at Ajanta began with careful preparation of the rock, in five stages.

1. The rock surface was left with chisel marks and grooves so that the plaster would hold.
2. A ground layer of rough ferruginous earth mixed with rock grit or sand, vegetable fibres, paddy husk and grass was applied to the walls and ceilings.
3. A second coat of mud and ferruginous earth with fine rock powder or sand and fine vegetable fibres followed.
4. The surface was finished with a thin coat of lime wash.
5. Outlines were drawn boldly, and the spaces filled with colours in different shades to give rounded, three-dimensional forms.

The colours were red and yellow ochre, terra verte, lime, kaolin, gypsum, lamp black and lapis lazuli, bound mainly with glue. Because a binding agent was used, the Ajanta paintings are not frescoes: a true fresco is painted while the lime wash is still wet, and the lime itself binds the colour. As the caves are dark inside, most paintings were done in the light of torches.

Bagh Caves and the Rock-Cut Tradition After the Guptas

The Bagh caves, in Dhar district of Madhya Pradesh, hold the other Gupta-age murals usually named beside Ajanta. Nine Buddhist rock-cut monasteries were cut into the southern slopes of the Vindhyas above the seasonal Baghani stream, and five survive; Cave 4, the Rang Mahal or palace of colours, is the most significant. The paintings were done in tempera over lime priming on a reddish-brown mud plaster, and are like those of Ajanta in character, though more worldly than spiritual. A copperplate records repairs to Cave 2 in the late fifth century.

Rock-cut architecture itself paused under the Guptas. At Ajanta an early group of caves was made by 220 CE and a later one mostly after about 460, and the Gangetic plain, the empire's heartland, had few rock-cut sites. The great caves in the Gupta style were made under other dynasties, and the tradition continued in the Deccan at Badami and Aihole under the Chalukyas and at Mahabalipuram under the Pallavas.

At Mamallapuram, named after the Pallava king Narasimhavarman I, known as Mamalla, the Descent of the Ganga, also called Arjuna's Penance, is a giant open-air relief carved on two boulders, about 29 by 13 metres. It tells how the Ganga came down to earth from the heavens, led by Bhagiratha.

Gupta Period Temple Architecture: The First Structural Temples

Parts of a Hindu Temple and the Nagara, Dravida and Vesara Styles

The Gupta period left almost the first surviving free-standing buildings in India, and in them the beginnings of Hindu temple architecture. Built to house the image of a god, the temple took a basic form that later temples elaborated but did not abandon.

• Garbhagriha: Literally the womb-house, a cave-like sanctum for the main icon; in early temples a small cubicle with a single entrance.
• Mandapa: The entrance, a portico or pillared hall with space for worshippers.
• Shikhara: From the fifth century CE, a mountain-like spire over the sanctum, curving in north India; in south India a pyramidal tower called the vimana.
• Vahana: The mount of the main deity, placed with a standard pillar on the axis before the sanctum.

Two broad orders of temple developed, Nagara in the north and Dravida in the south. A hybrid style, known in some ancient texts as Vesara, became popular in regions like Karnataka after the mid-seventh century. Gupta temples stand at the start of the Nagara line. The simplest Nagara tower, square at the base with walls curving inward to a point on top, is called latina or rekha-prasada.

Early Gupta Shrines: Sanchi, Udayagiri and Tigawa

Some of the oldest surviving structural temples of the Gupta period are in Madhya Pradesh. They are modest shrines: four pillars support a small mandapa, a square porch before an equally small room that served as the garbhagriha. Of the two that survive, one is at Udayagiri, part of a Hindu cave complex, and the other at Sanchi, a Buddhist site, so the same ideas were shaping the temples of both religions.

Temples such as Tigawa, of the early fifth century, and Sanchi Temple 17 are small but massively built stone buildings with a sanctuary and a columned porch. Both have flat roofs over the sanctuary, a feature that became uncommon by about the eighth century. Their plan is the most common basic plan, elaborated in later temples to the present day.

Other early sites are Eran, Nachna-Kuthara and Deogarh. These are simple structures of a veranda, a hall and a shrine at the rear. Each temple had a principal image of a god, and myths from the Puranas became part of the carved narrative on its walls.

Gupta Temples: Deogarh, Bhitargaon and Nachna

The Dashavatara temple at Deogarh, in Lalitpur district of Uttar Pradesh in the Betwa valley, was built in the early sixth century CE, about a hundred years after the small shrines of Sanchi and Udayagiri. It follows the panchayatana plan: the main shrine stands on a rectangular plinth with four smaller shrines at the corners, five in all. Its tall, curving latina shikhara makes it an early example of the classic Nagara temple.

The temple faces west, unusual since most face east or north, and has a grand doorway with Ganga on the left and Yamuna on the right. Three large reliefs of Vishnu cover the other walls: Sheshashayana, Vishnu reclining on the serpent Ananta, on the south; Nara-Narayana on the east; and Gajendramoksha on the west. Because Vishnu appears in many forms it was taken to be a temple of the ten avatars, but it is not known to whom the corner shrines were dedicated.

The temple at Bhitargaon, near Kanpur, is the largest Indian brick temple to survive from the Gupta age, dated to the late fifth century. It stands on a square plan with double-recessed corners, faces east, and has a tall pyramidal spire over the garbhagriha; terracotta panels on its walls show Shiva, Vishnu, Ganesha and Durga Mahishasuramardini.

The Parvati temple at Nachna, in Panna district of Madhya Pradesh, dated by some to about 465, though its dating is uncertain, stands on a raised, moulded plinth. Its square sanctum is surrounded by a circumambulation passage with perforated stone screen windows, Ganga and Yamuna flank the entrance, and its friezes are among the earliest in stone to narrate scenes from the Ramayana.

Gupta Numismatic Art: Gold Coins, Their Decline and the Legacy

Gupta Coins: The Gold Dinara and Its Types

Coins are the one art form in which the Gupta family pictured itself; they did not otherwise advertise their link to the art made under them. The gold coinage, with its many types and its Sanskrit inscriptions, is regarded as the finest in a purely Indian style, and the earliest issues are remarkable for their purity.

Gupta coinage began with Samudragupta (about 335/350 to 375 CE), or possibly at the end of the reign of his father Chandragupta I, of whom only one type is known, showing the king and his queen. It was first modelled on Kushan coinage, taking its weight standard, techniques and designs after Samudragupta's conquests in the north-west, and even the name dinara, which goes back to the Roman denarius aureus. The imagery soon became more Indian in style and subject. The king's reign is covered in Samudragupta and the Allahabad Prashasti.

• Layout: The king, usually full-length, standing, seated or on horseback on the obverse; a goddess, most often seated on a throne, on the reverse.
• Archer: The king standing with a bow, used by at least eight kings, perhaps to associate the king with Rama.
• Lion-slayer and tiger-slayer: The king hunting; such types very likely refer to new conquests in areas where those animals were found.
• Lyrist or veena player: Samudragupta playing a string instrument, wearing huge earrings but only a simple dhoti.
• Ashvamedha: The sacrificial horse on the obverse and the queen on the reverse.
• Silver and copper: Silver coins imitated those of the Western Satraps after Chandragupta II overthrew them, adding the Gupta peacock; copper coins, mostly of Chandragupta II, usually carry Garuda and the king’s name.

Coins served trade as well as art. They made long-distance transactions easier, and the kings benefited from them; the wider economy is in Gupta administration and economy.

Why Gupta Numismatic Art Was Not Matched in Later Times

The high point of Gupta coinage came early. Later Gupta gold coins show a gradual deterioration in design and execution, and silver money disappears, evidence of the empire's shrinking territory. From about the sixth century CE, finds of gold coins taper off in north India.

Historians are divided on the reason. Some suggest that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire cut the long-distance trade that had enriched the states and regions taking part in it; others argue that new towns and networks of trade were emerging at the same time. This is the basis of the view that later coinage never matched the Gupta gold in purity, variety and craft.

• Purity: The early gold issues were remarkably pure.
• Variety: Many types, each showing the king as archer, hunter, musician or sacrificer.
• Craft: Full-length figures and Sanskrit legends in a purely Indian style.
• Decline: Weaker design, the end of silver money and fewer gold finds after the sixth century.

Legacy of Gupta Art: Post-Gupta Styles and South-East Asia

The Gupta style outlived the empire. It stayed in use across most of northern India until about 550, and arguably 650, followed by a Post-Gupta period with many of the same features. The sculptures at Sondani near Mandsaur, commissioned by Yasodharman about 525 CE to celebrate his victory over the Alchon Hun king Mihirakula, stand between the classical decorum of Gupta art and the medieval canons that subordinated the figure to religious purpose. The political end is in Gupta society, religion and decline.

• South-East Asia: Gupta and Post-Gupta art from eastern India shaped Hindu and Buddhist art there from the 6th century CE; Mon statues of Dvaravati in Thailand recall the faces and hair of Mathura.
• Western India: The Maitraka rulers of Vallabhi in Gujarat (6th to 8th century) carried the Gupta legacy forward in sculptures of soft bluish-green stone.
• Temples: The curving Nagara tower first seen at Deogarh had grown, by the 10th-century temples of Khajuraho, into shikharas rising in a curved pyramidal fashion.
• Pillars: Gupta pillars recorded the achievements of kings; unlike the smooth, polished Ashokan pillars, they had a rough surface often shaped into geometric facets.

Sources

• NCERT: An Introduction to Indian Art Part I (Class XI, Fine Arts)
• NCERT: Our Pasts I (Class VI), Buildings, Paintings and Books
• NCERT: Themes in Indian History I (Class XII), Kings, Farmers and Towns
• Archaeological Survey of India: Ajanta Caves
• National Museum, New Delhi: Gupta Art gallery
• National Museum, New Delhi: Coins gallery sheet
• PIB: India's World Heritage Sites, 2024
• Wikipedia: Gupta art
• Wikipedia: Ajanta Caves
• Wikipedia: Bagh Caves
• Wikipedia: Udayagiri Caves
• Wikipedia: Dashavatara Temple, Deogarh
• Wikipedia: Bhitargaon Temple
• Wikipedia: Nachna Hindu temples
• Wikipedia: Iron pillar of Delhi
• Wikipedia: Sultanganj Buddha
• Wikipedia: Descent of the Ganges (Mahabalipuram)
• UPSC: Civil Services Examination question papers