Who weighs over 1,800 kilos, lives on a remote island, and can only travel by boat during India’s dry seasons? Answer: five ancient limestone sculptures that needed to get to New York, via container, pontoon barge, barge to cross the Krishna River and a truck to Hyderabad airport.
Now imagine the logistics of shipping another 120 or so rare Buddhist artifacts—dozens of which have never left India and many with their own series of obstacles—to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and you’ll have some idea of the challenges facing curators in your new exhibition: “Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BC-AD 400”
Securing loans of religious relics dating back to the 5th century BC from five countries required diplomatic finesse, prescient solutions and a lot of paperwork.
“This is the most extensive collection of Indian antiquities in more than a generation,” said Met curator John Guy, who began planning the show eight years ago. “We feel enormously privileged.
“Four flights arrived at JFK Airport with many tons of sculptures,” Guy said. They were 16 thousand 664 kilos, to be exact.
The spectacle relied on the generosity of lenders in India, Italy, the United States, England and Germany and included years of relationship-building visits. In the case of India alone, the negotiations included the central government, the Ministry of Culture, the Archaeological Survey of India, the National Museum and six state governments. Three US ambassadors to India and two Indian ambassadors to the US were also called upon.
Few of the borrowings in this show, which include intricate carvings of princely headdresses, flaming pillars and scenes of ecstatic devotion, have been seen outside India before, and of those that have traveled, most have not been on display for a generation or so. further. Many of the exhibits feature panels from stupas, the monumental religious domes, which have housed the remains of the Buddha after cremation, along with other spiritual materials.
The exhibition was scheduled to open in November 2020, but the coronavirus pandemic pushed it backand when the Met resumed planning in 2022, many of the people involved in earlier talks had been replaced.
The opening of the exhibition is now linked to the 75th anniversary of India’s independence.
“For us, it’s an exhibition that celebrates the Buddha’s teachings and compassion for living things and caring for the environment,” Guy said.
Perhaps the most difficult of the journeys was that of the five limestone sculptures and stupa panels that had to cross the Krishna River. The 3rd century AD collection from the island of Nagarjunakonda, in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, was the subject of two years of negotiation.
Two of the artifacts—ceremonial doorway rails engraved with scenes from the life of the Buddha—had never been on public display, Guy said.
Permission to bring the crossbars to the Met It took several years of talks with the State Ministry of Culturethe Department of Archaeology, a village chief and a member of the local Parliament.
It’s always tricky when ivory crosses borders. A number of licenses are required, including an international permit issued under an agreement between more than 100 countries to protect endangered species. Then there are the individual import and export permits by country and the required letters from academic authorities.
To display a 10-inch-tall ivory statuette of an Indian iakshi—a female nature spirit who was surprisingly recovered in 1938 during an excavation at Pompeii—required 18 months of paperwork. It was a remnant of trade between the Indian subcontinent and the Roman Empire in the 1st century AD The iakshi is the only Indian artifact recovered from the ancient Roman City.
In the jeweled statuette’s first trip outside of Italy, the sculpture was transported by air from the National Archaeological Museum in Naples to the Met. It is on display alongside another item of the luxury trade, a bronze statuette of Poseidon whose origins were Roman, but which was found in the Indian state of Maharashtra in 1944.
“Together these two tiny objects represent the entire history of Indo-Roman trade,” Guy said.
Rachel Sherman
The New York Times
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6829505, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-08-01 20:40:06
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