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WORLD'S GREATEST SCULPTURAL COLOSSUS COMPLETES
A THOUSAND YEARS
Gommatesvara, 57 feet giant granite colossus, chiselled out from the summit of 500 feet Indragiri mountain, in Sravanabelgola town situated at 86 miles from Bangalore, capital of Southern Indian State of Karnataka, will be completing a thousand years of its phenomenal existence in February 1981. The mountain itself is 3,347 feet above the sea level.
R. S. SURENDRA
The Gommateşvara statue ideally fits into the definition of sculpture-inrelief as specified in the new Encyclopaedia Britanica. Sculpture-in-relief is three dimensional object emerging out of a subjascent matrix. The statue has a kind of reality, a vivid physical presence that is denied in pictorial arts.
sculpture are as tangible and visible and appeal strongly, directly to both visual and tactual sensibilities. Such statues go beyond mere presentation of fact and communicate a wide range of subtle and powerful feelings. The aesthetic raw material of sculpture, so to speak, is the whole realm of expression of three dimensional forms. Here Indian sculptors have employed Iconometric Cannons or systems of carefully related proportions that determined the proportions of all significant dimensions of human figure.
The Gommatesvara statue is nude and the statues of Gommatesvara are among the most remarkable works of native art in South India long known to Europeans. Three of them are well known and that at Sravanabelgola attracted the attention of Late Duke of Wellington in 1799, (who defeated French Emperor Nepolean Bonaparte in 1815 at Waterloo), when as Sir A. Wellesly, commanded a division at the siege of Srirangapattnam in the 4th Mysore War. He, like all those who followed him, was astonished at the amount of labour such a work entailed and puzzled to know, whether it was a part of hill or had been moved to the spot where it now stands.
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