India - Bust Vishnu - Gupta - V To VI Eme Century - Thermoluminescence.s

Stuccoed ceramic bust of Vishnu in his solar representation. Its headdress is typical and has the appearance of a pleated cap on both sides of the central motif. It has a Brahmin cord on the torso and we can clearly see that the statue originally had 4 arms, which allows us to identify Vishnu with certainty. This iconography is interesting because it leads us to consider this piece as a late piece from the Gupta period even if the style is typically Gupta. We know in fact that from the end of the 5th century, the decline of the dynasty began. Quality artistic production was maintained well beyond the disappearance of the dynasty through numerous workshops that appeared further east such as the production of Sarnath (the Golden Age of classical India: the empire of Gupta: p32).This analysis is confirmed by the TL Test which gives an age of 1306 years since the last cooking, i.e. 712 AD. A piece from the Bangladesh Museum is quite close and is described from the same period (masterpiece from the Ganges delta p 142-143). Furthermore, the technique (stuco-ceramic) and the black coating that we find on quite a few late Gupta pieces may suggest that in the post-Gupta period when the Pala empire emerged, fashion moved to the stele made of black basalt stone. Dimensions excluding base: Height: 42 cm; width: 22 cm; Depth: 8 cm. Origin: Gupta dynasty (northern India) end of period - 5th to 6th century. Provenance: Former Luxembourg collection acquired in the 70s - Dr. VDW Collection