A gargoyle at Borobudur Temple, Java, Indonesia (9th century C.E.). Photo by Mindy McAdams via flickr.
Borobudur Temple is a massive Buddhist temple in Java, Indonesia. Built in the ninth century, Borobudur has a complex, tiered design and is richly decorated with hundreds of Buddha statues and thousands of relief-carved scenes depicting important Buddhist stories. It also has stupas and other sculpted imagery including gargoyles.
A Borobudur gargoyle. Photo by bicrom das (borobodur) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia CommonsFinding gargoyles, particularly functional gargoyles as these seem to be (rather than purely-decorative grotesques), on buildings with no religious, cultural, or geographic ties to any of the other gargoyles I’ve featured before excites me. The fact that many different artistic traditions independently felt the need to place real or imagined animals on their drain spouts seems to mean that there’s a larger significance to the existence of gargoyles than can be explained by any single culture’s interpretation of them.
Alexandra Kiely, aka A Scholarly Skater, is an art historian based in the northeastern United States. She loves wandering down the dark and dusty corners of art history and wholeheartedly believes in visual art's ability to enrich every person's life.
Her favorite periods of art history are 19th-century American painting and medieval European art and architecture. When she not looking at, reading about, writing about, or teaching art, she's probably ice dancing or reading.
View all posts by Alexandra Kiely (A Scholarly Skater)
2 thoughts on “Gargoyle of the Day: Borobudur Temple, Java, Indonesia”
That is an interesting point. I can’t think of any animal-form waterspouts in the ancient Near East, although mud brick buildings often had holes in the walls to let out water from the inner layers and I am not sure what they did to redirect water from the flat roofs without washing away the outer surface. So I will keep an eye out for gargoyles in early architecture. Fountains with the mouth (or other orifices) spouting water are not so unusual from Roman times onwards …
A Scholarly Skater 
That is an interesting point. I can’t think of any animal-form waterspouts in the ancient Near East, although mud brick buildings often had holes in the walls to let out water from the inner layers and I am not sure what they did to redirect water from the flat roofs without washing away the outer surface. So I will keep an eye out for gargoyles in early architecture. Fountains with the mouth (or other orifices) spouting water are not so unusual from Roman times onwards …
I always appreciate your insights. 🙂 If you ever do come across any ancient Near Eastern gargoyles, I would love to hear about them.