The Hindu deity Durga killing the buffalo demon

Sometimes a happy accident allows the original location of a little-known artwork to be determined with precision. It would hardly have seemed possible to determine the exact original site of this thousand-year-old Indonesian sculpture. Some years ago, however, former Asian Art Museum curator Dr. Nancy Tingley was looking through a recently issued microfiche set of eighteen thousand archival photographs of Indonesian antiquities. Suddenly, she came upon a 1917 photo of this sculpture at its original site, the ruined temple of Candi Nusukan in central Java. At some point the sculpture was removed from the site and became part of a private collection in Java. It was sold to a British dealer in the 1960s, and was eventually bought by the museum in 1969.

The sculpture depicts the powerful Hindu warrior goddess Durga. The male gods, unable to defeat a mighty demon in the form of a raging buffalo, each give a weapon to Durga, enabling her to overcome the demon. Here, Durga stands in victory, holding a snake that both encircles her waist and is entwined with the defeated creature’s tail. The demon, resuming his humanlike form, is emerging from the buffalo’s neck.