Gommateshvara Commemoration Volume

Author(s): T G Kalghatgi
Publisher: Parshwanath Shodhpith Varanasi

Page 52

The Colossal Statue of Gommateśvara and its Significance
27 earthly fame and name vicariously? In this context I recollect what Shakespeare has observed in his famous tragedy called Julius Ceasor "No comets fall, when a beggar dies but Heavens themselves blaze forth Prince's death".
Nudity of the Statue :
This superb statue symbolises a Spiritual Hero in his erstwhile human form after he renounced the worldly life including his loin cloth. There is nothing to be concealed at the highest stage of a spiritual aspirant. As mythology recites Bāhubali was the tallest, bravest and handsomest of all the sons of Adinātha, the first Jain Prophet. So naturally the sculptor, being almost divinely inspried has tried to exhibit in his art all the faculties of Bahubali, physical, moral and spiritual, as if Bahubali himself is personified in all his naturalness. So the nudity of the statue shines in all its purity and innocence as revealed in Nature. Even a small piece of cloth to conceal anything natural would have spoilt the beauty and grandeur of the present majestic statue with a smiling face in a meditative mood with a message to the erring humanity for giving up their selfishness and egotism and silently blessing one and all, good or bad.
Art seen through Artist's eyes :
Oscar Wilde observes, "An unhewn stone lies in the quarry, before the sculptor has set God within it”. John Keats so pertinently remarks, "The excellence of every art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate from their being in close relationship with Beauty and Truth." Ingersoll, a great Free-thinker and candid speaker of the nineteenth century in America, in his work entitled Liberty of Man observes, "Real art has nothing to do directly with morality or immorality. It is its own excuse for being, it exists for itself. There is an infinite difference between the nude and the naked, between the natural and the undressed. The undressed is vulgar while the nude is pure. The old Greek statues, frankly, proudly nude, whose free and perfect limbs have never known the sacrilege of clothes, -were and are as free from taint as pure as stainless, as the image of the morning star trembling in a drop of perfumed dew".
A great artist puts love, hope, heroism and triumph in stones and marbles, if not in dust-- in order to enrich the common things of earth with the gems and jewels of his mind. The paintings, the statues and the images that decorate the walls and windows of the mansions and colleges alike and the artistic descriptions that illuminate the pages of real literature have all originated from the private laboratory of the human brain.
Object of the Undisclosed Master Artist behind the majestic and holy Statue of Lord Bahubali :
Whatever his name, whatever his social status, whatever his place of birth, though now lost in antiquity or oblivion, the sculptor, who shaped the superb