Jaś Elsner:
Amarāvatī: Cosmography of an Ancient Stūpa

Each of the great stūpas of early Buddhist India is a major cosmographic act – placing a relic of the Blessed one in a huge devotional container and through visual imagery sketching his many lifetimes as Bodhisattva on the path of perfection and purification, as well as the culmination of this mission in his last lifetime on earth as Buddha.  The particular achievement of the arts of Amarāvatī, perhaps sculpturally the supreme and certainly most complex of all our surviving sites, is its exceptional self-reflectivity, especially in the drum panels which will be discussed here.

Jaś Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at Oxford, Visiting Professor of Art and Religion at the University of Chicago and External Member of the KHI. In recent years he has been working on the formation of religious iconographies across Eurasia (a project that culminated in the Ashmolean Show Imagining the Divine: Art and the Rise of the World Religions, October 2017 – February 2018) and on the comparative histories of early Christian and early Buddhist art.  His most recent sole-authored book is Eurocentric and Beyond: Art History, the Global Turn and the Possibilities of Comparison, Beijing: Horizon/OCAT, 2022. His new monograph Amarāvatī: Art and Buddhism in Ancient India is due to be published by Reaktion Books, London, in June 2024.

This presentation is part of the seminar series "Work in Progress. A Series of Conversations", which is dedicated to ongoing research projects at the KHI and organized by Hannah Baader and Hana Gründler.