Celestial Musician (Gandharva)
India (Karnataka, possibly Dharwar)
A semidivine celestial musician to the gods is shown playing a flute, standing beneath the canopy of a flowering tree. This bracket figure was intended to decorate a pillar capital of the interior of a Hindu temple of the western Chalukyas. Temples of the southern Deccan favored the use of such figures of celestial musicians and dancers, poised at an angle between the capital of a pillar and the temple's interior ceiling stones to form a bridge between the worldly and heavenly spheres, and to make explicit the notion of the temple as a heavenly palace.
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