Marcenta, Chiara "THE DIVINE GAZE OF THE BAZAAR The figurative power of divine Hind? iconographies and the artistic reproduction in 19th-20th century India." MA History of Arts
, Ca' Foscari University of Venice, 2020
Keywords/Fields of Study : Mechanical art reproduction; Mechanical technology; India; Raja Ravi Varma; Walter Benjamin
Abstract: Positioned in the templar complexes and religious environments since the most ancient times, the representations of Hind? deities have always enjoyed considerable prestige, reaching in modern times the spaces of the popular market and spreading, in the form of lithographic, chromolithographic and photographic prints, in the major Indian shops with a special place in the bazaar. Such a market insertion was made possible by the technological innovations that in the colonial era animated and influenced artistic production in India, leading it - in the figurative field - to new, original, successful solutions and in some ways with developments different from what it was happening in Europe. If the mechanical reproduction undermined the uniqueness of the work of art in the European background, in the period under investigation the technological means would seem to operate in the opposite direction in the Indian context, ensuring the popularization and the success of the works of art at the same time. Therefore this study intends to analyze the technical developments that marked the Indian art scene between the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, with particular reference to the elaboration of the specific iconography of Hind? deities. By examining the role and figurative power of ancient representations and by analyzing their iconographic developments, we propose to examine how religious iconographies have acquired popularity thanks to mechanical reproduction and their diffusion through the printed media. To satisfy these aims, the research takes as its main reference the work of Raja Ravi Varma (1848-1906), one of the first Indian academic painters of the 19th-century. The artist's popularity was amplified when he set up his own art press in 1894 Bombay, intending to exploit modern mechanical technologies to reproduce and disseminate chromolithographic copies of his works, in particular puranic and mythological paintings. Raja Ravi Varma's press - one of the pioneers of the print reproduction activity - and the others that are flourishing in the following years will be responsible for the birth of a new artistic genre that is still highly appreciated, the so-called calendar art, scattered in the bazaars of the major Indian cities and mainly animated by representations of Hind? deities. This success confirms the role of new reproduction techniques in determining the iconographic fortune of peculiar artistic subjects in the Subcontinent. It is on this basis therefore that the guiding principle of this research made use of the thesis elaborated by the German intellectual Walter Benjamin in The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction (1935), in an attempt to make a distinction between the consequences that mechanical means have implemented in the art productions of Europe and India. Indeed if the argument of the Berlin critic - who sees reproducibility as the cause of the loss of the aura of the work of art - applies to 19th-century modern European art, this could be questioned in the Indian case where the reproduction turns out to be an occasion of consecration for the artists, as demonstrated by the activity of Raja Ravi Varma. Under today's wide diffusion of these iconographic prints, this work intends to lay the foundations for future studies and researches that could look at the modalities of popular consumption of these representations and the type of public user.
Department: Fine Arts
, Ca' Foscari University of Venice
Advisor(s): Sara Mondini
