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| Home > Types Of Sculpture > Icons and Imagery
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| | Icons and Imagery Sculpture
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The relation of icons with an imagination is felt many years ago. The figurative sculpture carved on Indian temples as a common feature has a special function too. It is used in relation to the image of the temple as cosmic mountain. It sets in order to combine and integrate more on the whole Indian heritage of literature and legend. Of course, this huge task cannot possibly be achieved. But efforts in this direction were continually attempted or rather it is continually symbolized in the ornament of the temple.
 The heritage of our history of Indian culture is dominated by the sustained effort towards the imagination of Indians to perform the great ultimate feat of imaginative synthesis. In the sphere of philosophy and religion schematic surveys, all-embracing compendia represent this effort or endless try to achieve this. And in the framework of literature and art superb aesthetic theories were worked out to perform the same task. Through the architecture of the temple different moods of life and thought are truly represented and summarized, including all the mythical animals, spirits and semi-human creatures of folklore.
The base upon which the temple stands represents the earth, Prithivi, which is the eternal mother of all. When such a base and its columns bear any kind of sculptural work, this is generally devoted to heroic legends. Mostly these legends are taken from the great epics of India; the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. The stories that appeared in the lower portion of carving were supposed to have took place on earth somewhere in the glorious past and incarnated forms of Gods played leading roles in it. Higher up & based on this epic stories, at the outside walls and round the base of the towering spire, are bands representing figures of the inhabitants of the heavens. These figures include major deities that are shown in their proper iconic forms, a host of lesser deities, fabulous animals, flying celestials and numerous images of the Apsarases.
 The Apsarases are believed as celestial girls of divyabeauty and highly amorous in propensity. There are many legends that are famous about their descent to earth to enjoy love affairs with mortal men. In heaven, those who have lived with righteous lives are believed to be rewarded by company of them. They give a powerful incentive for the one that lived a righteous life, as the Buddha`s brother Nanda was discovered in a famous tale. This Apsarases also represent the celestial counterparts of the sacred dancer-prostitutes, the Devadasis, who were attached to many temples in olden days.
At the top, the summits of the temple, its peaks and pinnacles, are crowned with flat, fruit-like discs seen in almost all temples. These represent the highest heavens, or the ultimate limits of reality. The cosmic mountains are supposed to be reaches at farther still beyond it. Reflected from the images of the vast, silent peaks of the Himalayas, towering white into the depths of the violet sky, have always exerted a strong fascination on the imagination of Indian sculptors. They mainly represent the reaches of spiritual experience, beyond this point all mortality and change are of meaningless, to which the direct gateway is provided by the temple.
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