Agnieszka Staszczyk, Hindu Sculpture in Mathura from 2nd CE to 4th CE. Iconography and Form, [Rzeźba hinduistyczna w Mathurze od II do IV w. n.e. Ikonografia i forma], Wydawnictwo DiG, Warszawa 2013.
Religious representations discussed in this book origin from Mathura, the well-known and important artistic centre of North India. They may be numbered among the earliest cult stone sculptures that depicted gods of the Hindu pantheon. The author of the book selected images of Agni, Indra, Surya, Vishnu, Brahma, Vasudeva-Krishna, Sankarshana-Balarama, Rudra-Śiva, Skanda-Karttikeya and Ganapati-Vinayaka. Some of those deities are of the Vedic origin, and the others were included in the Hindu pantheon as a result of the evolution of religious beliefs and incorporation of local and indigenous cults. Images of these gods are analysed from a historical and religious perspective. Since most of them were depicted for the first time in Mathura sculpture, iconographic analysis is the important aspect of the work. The cult representations of this kind are significant for the research on the religious art sources. Finding a genesis of the divine representations that were sculpted in Mathura, as well as the origins of the elements of such representations, is fundamental in an analysis of this type. In the comparative analysis the author included the oldest examples of the images of individual iconographic types. Furthermore, she took into account the relevant pieces of the literary tradition, and finally discussed parallel depictions in art later than the 4th century AD. Besides, having carefully studied the sculptures' forms and having included numerous examples of each type, the author could place objects representing a particular type in chronological order. The study is therefore crucial both for dating the Mathura sculptures and for tracing the evolution of the Mathura style.
Key words: Hindu art, Mathura region, sculpture, the Kushana dynasty, iconography, evolution of forms, gods of the Vedic origin, early Vaishnava and Shaiva images