Word: linga
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Your picture selection of Indian sculpture is interesting, but TIME sees more than meets the eye. To my knowledge there is no "Four-Faced Siva-Linga." The sculpture of this Hindu god has three faces, representing the three aspects of Siva as creator, preserver and destroyer...
...Only three faces show in relief sculpture, but in this case Reader Peyer has seen less than meets the eye. The Siva-Linga shown by TIME has four faces (for his four aspects, including his peaceful, feminine one, which faces north). In addition, there is traditionally a fifth (signifying the Cosmos) on top, but invisible to mere mortals...
...West are such carefully selected collections as that recently acquired by Philadelphia's Museum of Art (opposite). Containing 49 carved stone sculptures and temple fragments ranging from a 2nd-to-1st century B.C. sandstone relief on a post of a temple railing to a four-faced Siva-Linga that once topped the central column of a Hindu shrine, the collection covers more than 15 centuries, together makes up what museum officials unhesitatingly call "the most important group of Indian stone sculptures to be seen outside of India itself...