Alice Casalini: The art of crossing over: Gandhāran pathways to nirvāṇa

The art of Gandhāra—a region stretching across modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan—has often been heralded as prime example of proto-globalization: its rich and syncretic visual vocabulary that freely borrows from Hellenistic, Iranian and Indian models easily lends itself to this discourse in the early centuries of the first millennium. Aquatic imagery in Gandhāra is one of the many lemmas in such vocabulary: nereids, tritons, and other sea monsters are commonly discussed as one of the figurative vehicles through which Hellenism reached Central and South Asia and took hold there. This talk, however, takes a different approach to this kind of images and explicitly asks what the role and function of aquatic imagery was within a Buddhist context. This talk demonstrates that the answer can be found in the Buddhist visual rhetoric of salvation. Through the careful analysis of several panels from the site of Andan Dheri, in the Swat Valley, and a series of preliminary reconstructions of the original architectural context of those panels depicting sea creatures, I show that aquatic imagery was in fact a fundamental part of a specific iconographic program centered around metaphors of water-crossing—indeed, one of the most enduring and popular metaphors of spiritual refinement meant to lead the devotee towards nirvāṇa.

Alice Casalini received her MA in Chinese Studies from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and trained as an archaeologist at the Department of Archaeology and Museology of Peking University and with the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan. She is currently a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Chicago.