Spires, goose tails, and . . .
Spires,
goose tails and other ornamental points and barbs are everywhere in the
arts of Siam and Burma from the 1800s, the focus of the Asian Art Museum’s
fall exhibition, Emerald Cities: Arts of Siam and Burma. The taste of the
age favored complicated silhouettes shooting forth an array of flames and
tendrils. Stylized ultra-elegance was the goal.
Think of a Thai classical dancer dressed not in a flowing costume of chiffon with varying, soft outlines but in a structured costume of brocade folded and pleated, and topped with a bristling crown and jewelry, to create a complex profile. The dancer’s movements are slow but filled with tension, arms straining to hyperextend the elbows, and the fingers curled in seemingly impossible positions then held there. The effect of great energy tightly restrained is reminiscent of Rama’s bow drawn but not released.
The trendsetters were the royal courts, heirs of centuries of refinement in manners and appearance. Frequently the settings of narratives portrayed in painting, sculpture, poetry, and dance-drama were the heavens—where deities dwelled like kings—or the palaces and enchanted forests of legend. Artists set out to evoke the transcendent glamour of the higher realms not just of myth but also of the spirit. And what about the goose tails? Read on.
From ancient times, in Indian and related Southeast Asian thought, the flight of wild geese toward the heavens was associated with spiritual striving. In Thailand figures of wild geese were displayed at the top of tall poles during both celebratory and funereal ceremonies. Architectural elements called “goose tails” ornamented the roofs of temples and palaces.
What
are usually called “goose tails” in Thai are the elements that jut out and
up from the lower corners of a gable. Sometimes they resemble heads of mythical
serpents. Examples can be seen on the miniature temple at left.
Roofs and rooflike elements such as the upper part of the board for Buddhist tablets shown opposite, at top left, are often ornamented with a variety of hooks, points, and saw-toothed borders.
In the detail of a painting in gold on black lacquer above, notice the multiple points not only on the roof and the figures’ crowns but also on the ceremonial parasol, fans, and flywhisks on either side of the Buddha.
In ancient India the stupa was a mound of earth constructed to enclose and honor the relics of a revered person. Relics of the Buddha were enshrined in stupas, which became the focus of worship and pilgrimage. Early Buddhist stupas were often sheathed in stone, but maintained the hemispherical shape of a mound. Later stupas in India grew taller and more elaborate, and were often decorated with ornamental or figural carvings.
In
Thailand the trend to elongation continued until the stupa had taken on
the shape of a tall, thin cone with a needle-like spire.
The painting at right shows a scene in the Heaven of the Thirty-Three Gods in which homage is paid to a stupa enshrining hair relics of the Buddha. The stupa is flanked by tiered, pointed Thai honorific parasols, and even the elaborate frame around the stupa sprouts points along its edges.
Objects from Burma as well as Siam often display elongated finials. The shape of the one on the offering vessel shown above is sometimes said to represent a stupa (examples of which can be seen on the preceding pages), but in fact it is only decorative and has no specific meaning.
In
the Siamese painting at left can again be seen wedding-cake–like tiered
parasols. The parasols, the crowns and costumes of the Buddha and his disciples,
and the throne and throne back all bristle elegantly with projecting points.
Siamese royal crowns and the replicas used in
theatrical costumes have tall spires of several shapes. Sometimes, but not
always, the exact shape indicates something about the character’s identity.
(For example, the crowns of the figures hovering in the sky in the painting
on the previous page identify those figures as celestial hermits or ascetics.)
In all of the works shown in this article, notice how many elements—from the goose-tail–like stern of a flying chariot to the twining vines behind some of the figures—are made up of, or decorated with, curving and recurving elements ending in hooks and barbs. These reinforce the sense of tightly wound energy characteristic of nineteenth-century Siamese art.
Thailand
and Burma, neighboring countries approximately the same size in area and
population, have many cultural features in common (Theravada Buddhism above
all), but they have traditionally been adversaries. Burma conquered the
primary Thai kingdom of Ayutthaya in 1767, but within a few decades their
fortunes began to reverse. Burma lost a series of wars with the British
and was eventually overcome and reduced to a colony. Thailand—then Siam—recovered
and became more powerful than ever; though it faced enormous pressure from
both the British and the French, was able to maintain a large degree of
its independence.
The 1800s saw a brilliant flowering of all the arts in Thailand, under the patronage of both the aristocracy and wealthy merchant families. Burma’s arts flourished similarly in the earlier part of the century, but patronage was disrupted by increasing British encroachment, the eventual fall of the monarchy, and annexation by Britain in 1886.
As was true all over Asia, the arts of Siam and Burma in the second half of the 1800s began to be affected by Western styles and attitudes, the development of tourism and mass communication, and new technologies such as photography and power machinery.
The Asian Art Museum houses a large and important collection of Burmese, Siamese, and Shan/Northern Thai art objects from the period of about 1780 to 1950. Most of these were donated from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation’s Southeast Asian Art Collection; other donors have also been generous. We have been eager for the opportunity to display and publish these fascinating objects, and to begin to place them in historical and cultural context.
Forrest McGill, Chief Curator
