Imre Jakabffy (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 1. (Budapest, 1973)

HORVÁTH, Vera : Additional material to the iconography of the so called bearing-Goddess

practised magic when the bees were created and the first tiger was equally created by a Goddes. In other tales a Goddess was pregnant with the earth and the rainbow, butterfly, frog and horse were all born by a Goddess.'

1 If we return — after this digression — to our terracotta figurine it is hard to put and fix its time of origin in the Kushan period. In any case it is worth while to mention that it represents a much lower stage of development in the art than the terracotta statues of the Kushan period. The primitive, roughly shaped face can not be compared with the delicately moulded portrait-like terracotta statues of the period which are full of life. The same must be said of the shaping of the body what is flat and does not follow the natural lines of the human body. The entirely misshaped right arm is anatomically doomed to failure the shoulder is not an organic part of the body, the sharply outward bent arm has no elbow. In the same way the stump of the remaining right leg is equally mis-shapen but due to the fact that it is a fragment this "distortion" is less conspicuous. The rearside of the figurine is not all elaborated. In addition to the difference in the artistic value there is a difference in the moulding and technical procedure of the figurette's production as well. While the majority of the terracottas of the Kushan period were cast in moulds, where the inside of the statues is hollow, the figurette forming the subject of our examination was made in two stages. In the first stage the limbless trunk was made. It was pressed into a wooden form, at least it is shown by the head, eyes, the sharp-cut outline of the nose and the shaping of the rosetta. The limbs modelled by hand and the breast were stuck to the trunk later on only. On the right leg behind, it is clearly visible that it had been stuck to the trunk with several strokes of smoothing as it has preserved the traces of human fingers. The protruding parts of the statue made of different material, containing more quartz than the trunk burns out at a higher temperature and does not stick well. This statement is supported also by the fact that the protruding parts broke off exactly at the sticking surfaces and apart from the right leg the figurine becams defective at the very points of the sticking surfaces. And one more distinctive mark: our figurine is not made of red terracotta burt it is made of a material that becomes grey after baking coated with another material that becomes reddish brown when baked. All these differences show that as soon as a good opportunity presents itself to make a far-reaching comparison with materials of other museums we shall perhaps be able to establish more precisely the time of origin of our figurine. We can establish so far that our figurine belongs to the so called bearing-Goddess group and it is earlier than the statues of the Kushan period, at the same time nothing indicates that it would be a representation of the Indus-valley, moreover that our figurine represents a hitherto missing link between this type of Indus-valley representation and that of the emergence of the Gupta period representation. That is why we consider this figurine to be significant far beyond its artistic value. NOTES: 1 Takács, Z. de: Kushan art in the Francis Hopp Museum at Budapest and some related art products. Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art 1937. 173. Fig. 5. Pl. XIX. 58