Himalayan Bronzes

Himalayan Bronzes focuses on a complete study of 340 medieval-period copper alloy sculptures from the Himalayan regions of Afghanistan, northern Pakistan, Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Nepal, and Tibet. For more than 1,500 years, artists in isolated valleys in and adjacent to the mountains of the Himalayas have created magnificent copper-based statues representing deities and spiritual leaders of the Hindu, Buddhist and Bon-Po religions. Author Chandra L. Reedy's multidisciplinary approach to the study of these statues integrates methods and techniques from art history, art conservation, geology, chemistry, statistics, archaeology, and ethnography to answer art historical and anthropological questions. Her guiding premise is that gathering and combining several types of information will result in more and better answers than any one type alone.

Historical and technical considerations in provenancing and collecting Greek, Etruscan, and Roman bronzes.

"A master of composition and technique, De Vries was relatively unknown until the J. Paul Getty Museum's groundbreaking 1999 exhibition, Adriaen de Vries: Imperial Sculptor, which firmly established the artist's reputation and afforded a rare opportunity to study in depth a large group of bronzes. This heavily illustrated volume presents the results of the technical study of twenty-five bronzes from the exhibition. Introductory chapters provide background on the artist and technical methodologies. Subsequent chapters present case studies of individual statues, revealing the methods and materials used in their creation"--Publisher's website.

This broad treatment of architecture throughout the region of the Himalaya mountains is the first book of its kind. The author has based this study on many years of research in Nepal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Assam, and the Darjeeling area of northeast India, northern Pakistan, and Himachal Pradesh in India's northwest. These areas make up an artistic and, to some degree, a cultural unit. It is unique and definable for its design qualities as well as its use of materials. Dramatic and lofty structures rise as towering palaces and as temples dedicated to Hindu and Buddhist ideals. The impact of neighboring Tibet and India is often evident in the art, but other influences are found as well. The area has not been isolated, as some studies suggest, but was in fact always linked to the rest of Asia and to the West by means of the Silk Road, at least since the second century B.C. This study progresses from east to west, beginning in the foothills of India's Assam. It is richly illustrated with photographs, most of which are the author's or his wife's, and many of the photographs are published here for the first time. The archives of the Archaeological Survey of India and the Department of Archaeology of His Majesty's Government of Nepal are also used here.

This volume is the first tangible result of an international project initiated by the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) with the aim of compiling a bibliographic database documenting publications on South and Southeast Asian art and archaeology. The bibliographic information, over 1,300 records extracted from the database, forms the principal part of this publication. It is preceded by a list of periodicals consulted and followed by three types of indexes which help users to find their way in the ABIA South and Southeast Asian Art and Archaeology Index (ABIA Index). The detailed bibliographic descriptions, controlled keywords and many elucidating annotations make this reference work into an indispensable guide to recent scholarly work on the prehistory and arts of South/Southeast Asia.

Script and writing were among the most important inventions in human history, and until the invention of printing, the handwritten book was the primary medium of literary and cultural transmission. Although the study of manuscripts is already quite advanced for many regions of the world, no unified discipline of ‘manuscript studies’ has yet evolved which is capable of treating handwritten books from East Asia, India and the Islamic world equally alongside the European manuscript tradition. This book, which aims to begin the interdisciplinary dialogue needed to arrive at a truly systematic and comparative approach to manuscript cultures worldwide, brings together papers by leading researchers concerned with material, philological and cultural aspects of different manuscript traditions.

Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art --

From approximately the third century BCE through the thirteenth century CE, the remote mountainous landscape around the glacial sources of the Ganga (Ganges) River in the Central Himalayas in northern India was transformed into a region encoded with deep meaning, one approached by millions of Hindus as a primary locus of pilgrimage. Nachiket Chanchani’s innovative study explores scores of stone edifices and steles that were erected in this landscape. Through their forms, locations, interactions with the natural environment, and sociopolitical context, these lithic ensembles evoked legendary worlds, embedded historical memories in the topography, changed the mountain range’s appearance, and shifted its semiotic effect. Mountain Temples and Temple Mountains also alters our understanding of the transmission of architectural knowledge and provides new evidence of how an enduring idea of India emerged in the subcontinent. Art History Publication Initiative. For more information, visit http://arthistorypi.org/books/mountain-temples-and-temple-mountains