Bharhut Sculpture Art
Grade 12 · ART · Indian Sculpture
A Grade 12 Visual Arts resource exploring the Bharhut tradition of Indian sculpture and its artistic characteristics.
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About this resource
"Bharhut Sculpture Art" is a lesson presentation for Grade 12 Art, filed under Indian Sculpture, prepared by Nilmini Jayasekara.
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Slides work best as revision after the lesson rather than instead of it: read the matching pages in the reading book first, then use these to check what you remember. For Grade 12 this is usually a single topic per file.
The stupa railings and gateway at Bharhut (2nd century BCE, central India) carry some of the earliest surviving narrative Buddhist relief carving: flatter and more linear than the later, more sculptural Amaravati style, with figures labelled by inscription and, like Sanchi, representing the Buddha through symbols rather than his human form.
Being the earliest of the major Indian Buddhist sites covered in this unit, Bharhut is the natural starting point for a chronological answer about the development of Indian Buddhist art - from flat, linear, symbol-based carving at Bharhut, through to the more naturalistic, image-based art of the Gupta period.
