Leonardo in Bali? - A Vishnu by a Carver of the Njana Tilem Gallery

Vishnu by a carver of the Njana Tilem Gallery, last third of the twentieth century, 38 cm

This beautiful figure of Vishnu, carved in pale wood (likely panggal buaya, also known as "crocodile wood"), dates from the last third of the twentieth century. The monogram of the Njana Tilem Gallery is engraved beneath the base. Founded in the late 1950s by Ida Bagus Tilem, eldest son of Ida Bagus Njana, this gallery is located in the village of Mas. To this day, it employs skilled sculptors to produce works of exceptional quality, some of which reproduce models originally created by Ida Bagus Tilem himself.

Vishnu is one of the three principal deities of the Trimurti, alongside Brahma and Shiva. As a protective god, he is distinguished by attributes such as the conch (shankha), symbolizing the primordial sound of creation, and the mace (gada), evoking strength and authority. Both objects appear in this sculpture, along with the fly-whisk, a symbol of royalty. Modern Balinese sculpture most often depicts Vishnu riding Garuda, and more rarely seated alone, as is the case here. The posture, with the left leg unfolded and the presence of a second pair of arms, likely reflects the influence of Indian models.

This piece displays a trait occasionally found in modern Balinese sculpture, particularly in certain tradition-inspired representations of seated deities: an organization of forms so regular that it seems to obey a combination of geometric figures. The effect is undeniably heightened by the frontality of the pose: as the diagram I amused myself by sketching above — guided purely by intuition — seems to show, the arrangement of the arms and attributes appears to fit within a regular octagon, while the legs suggest a triangle, itself enclosed within a rectangle bordered on the right by the mace, on the left by the knee, and at top and bottom by the heels. One can, as a secondary exercise, pick out a number of other geometric figures, which seem to contain, or be contained within, those just described.

Naturally, this kind of diagram calls to mind certain European representations in which a tracing is superimposed onto the image of a body, aiming to highlight the geometric relationships supposedly governing its structure implicitly. Within a Western tradition steeped in ideas from ancient Greece (for instance Pythagoras and Plato), the use of such a regulating diagram generally rests on the belief that the world was the work of a geometer God. The most famous example is, of course, the drawing known as Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. In a move typical of Renaissance Neoplatonism, Leonardo draws a connection between the principles set out by the ancient architect Vitruvius and a Christian conception of artistic creation — one in which the work is meant to celebrate the geometric harmony of the human body as an ideal reflection of the harmony of divine creation.

Leonardo da Vinci, Vitruvian Man, c. 1492, pen and wash drawing, 34 × 26 cm, Gallerie dell'Accademia (Cabinet of Drawings and Prints), Venice, image under Creative Commons license

The diagram I have traced echoes this Western tradition. But is it truly meaningful to apply such a method of schematic analysis to a Balinese sculpture? Admittedly, the West holds no monopoly on the search for harmony grounded in geometry and measure: one finds it both in the rigor of the geometric compositional principles of the Indian Shilpa Shastras — sacred treatises governing the arts and crafts — and, on a Balinese scale, in the more fluid principles of the Asta Kosala Kosali, a system of spatial and architectural rules in which proportions are adapted anthropometrically to the body of the patron commissioning the work, and of which Jean Couteau offers an illuminating overview in an article published on the NOW! Bali website.

The complexity of the question, however, calls for caution against the temptation to superimpose a diagram like mine onto this Vishnu from Njana Tilem. Does this diagram reveal a deliberate geometric structuring inherited from certain artistic rules, or is it merely a kind of coincidence — the simple visual consequence of a frontal, symmetrical pose dictated by iconographic convention? Without deeper knowledge of the real relationship modern Balinese sculpture bears to its own textual and technical traditions, I cannot, for now, settle the question.