The Sensuous and the Sacred: Chola Bronzes from South India, a new exhibit at the Sackler Gallery running through March 9, shows a number of these popular bronze devotionals from the Chola dynasty, particularly in the form of bronze sculptures. Complemented by explanatory texts, quotes from modern Hindu followers, pictures of modern devotional practice and traditional music, the sculptures take on a vibrant life not simply as works of art but as their intended purpose living, devotional aids.

Unlike the Western monotheistic tradition, Hinduism and other Asian religions hold to the notion of multiplicity, the belief that all religions are expressions of the Divine. The two major Hindu gods featured in the exhibit are Shiva, who creates and destroys the world in a continuous cycle (Indian cosmology holds to a non-linear perspective of time), and Vishnu, who takes the form of an avatar whenever the world meets evil. Yet even these gods take on different earthly forms, such as Lord of Dance, father, husband and Dancing Krishna. Particularly fascinating is the exhibits dancing statues, which, with their four arms and dynamic, one-legged poses, recall the vibrant fluctuations of South Asian dance.

In accordance with this view of multiplicity, the Chola dynasty also promoted the production of Buddhist and Jain bronzes. While neither of these religions came close to meeting Hinduisms prominence, their expressions in sculpture reveal the bronzes cultural rather than religious influences, as demonstrated by the similar facial features and smoothing techniques. Religion did, of course, seem to affect patronage, for artisans clearly gave Hindu sculptures (at least as shown in the exhibit) far more elaborate and expressive details than their Buddhist and Jain counterparts.

Perhaps as fascinating as the sculptures themselves is the way they are created. Artisans engage in a lengthy, exacting process to individually create each bronze. Using a mold derived from waxes, they individually create the different parts of the sculpture by pouring in molten bronze and then breaking it free from the mold when it cools. After assembling the parts into a whole, they chisel away for weeks to create the necessary distinguishing details. In the Gallerys visual depiction of this procedure, the bronzes appear even more amazing while virtually mass-produced for the numerous Chola temples, each sculpture remains its own individual, skillfully made work of art.

Though the bronzes are themselves fascinating, the Gallery does not sufficiently explain their complex religious backgrounds. Many viewers, especially those from a Judeo-Christian background, may find the treatment of the bronzes unnecessarily iconoclastic, as photos show them treated more lavishly than most human beings would deserve. In the Hindu view, however, the worshipped deities actually enter the bronze. To explain it more psychologically, we could say that most practitioners have difficulty relating to an abstract concept and therefore more effectively worship the deity with the aid of a concrete devotional.

Nevertheless, the Chola bronzes indeed take on a life of their own. Despite their age, they continue to hold religious significance for modern followers (the Gallery even gives patrons the option of removing their shoes in the exhibit to show respect, and some bronzes have flowers by their feet). Indeed, they show a vibrant devotion almost forgotten in the contemporary West. And those dancing poses are unbelievably cool.

An exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery here, "The Sensuous and the Sacred: Chola Bronzes From South India," doesn't waste much time. Its opening salvo, unleashed within mere yards of the entrance, consists of three spectacular bronzes of the Hindu god Shiva as Nataraja, Lord of Dance. In each, Shiva balances on his right leg while crooking his left up and across his body, communicating the sense of imminent motion be it a spin across the heavens or a tremor of devotion that animates all great Indian sculpture.

His famous dreadlocks are already fanning out from his head like an undulating musical score. His poised body is framed by a large hooplike aureole called a prabha, which is at once the circle of life and a ring of fire. After all, Shiva's dance is one of cosmic force that destroys and then recreates the world. Even the nonspecialist is likely to suspect that these astounding presences add up to the kind of artistic confab that curators and scholars of Indian art yearn for.

Indeed. The dancing Shivas, lent by museums in Dallas and Amsterdam and an unnamed private collector, lead off a succession of works, many of which are well known and widely reproduced, that are rarely, if ever, seen in one another's company. A collaboration between the Sackler and the American Federation of Arts, this exhibition has been organized by Vidya Dehejia, a professor of art history at Columbia University and formerly the chief curator and deputy director of the Sackler. It is the first in the United States to concentrate solely on the bronze temple sculptures created during the nearly four-century reign of the devout, munificent and innovative Chola emperors.

The Cholas ruled the South Indian region of Tamil Nadu, which centers on the holy river Kaveri and the city of Tanjore, from the middle of the 9th century to the late 13th century. At times, they expanded this empire to include Sri Lanka and the Maldives and sent emissaries as far as China. They built ever larger and more elaborate temples festooned with stone images of gods, goddesses and their acolytes; these were thriving centers of faith as well as of devotional dance, music and poetry. Each Chola temple contained a sanctum closed to all but select priests, within which dwelt the primary, emblematic but nonfigurative image of the god to whom the temple was dedicated usually either Shiva or Vishnu, foremost among the numerous Hindu gods, all of whom are representatives of a higher unseen being.

In an egalitarian impulse that seems intrinsic to Hindu heterogeneity, the idea that the gods should be accessible without priestly mediation had been gaining strength for some time. "The lord comes within everyone's reach" is how the great ninth-century Tamil poet-saint Nammalvar put it. The Chola rulers began commissioning bronze versions of the temples' stone depictions of the gods' different earthly incarnations called avatars. A single temple required multiple images of its primary god, like Shiva as Lord of Dance, Destroyer of Three Cities and Seductive Mendicant.

Unlike their stone counterparts, these bronze images were portable. Seen as living incarnations of the gods, they were ritually bathed and fed, and then clothed in lavish fabrics, jewels and flowers; they were carried through the streets like earthly rulers, as part of either elaborate festivals or daily rituals.

This tradition fostered, and was fostered by, the refinement of a sophisticated lost-wax casting process, which had not yet been rediscovered in the West. Soon the components of a golden age were in place: until around 1250, when a period of political disintegration and violence began, the Chola oversaw a period that ranks among the world's high points of figurative sculpture, bronze-casting and religious tolerance.

It would not be an overstatement to say that these sculptures are among the most beautiful ever made, in any material. There are 56 here and they easily overcome the first requirement of any Sackler show: distracting viewers from the depressing reality of a museum that is mostly underground, nearly devoid of natural light and plagued by a confusing missile-silo layout. The sculptures' transporting combination of formal perfection, religious gravity and life-affirming alertness can make the setting all but disappear.

The show offers a reasonably full contingent of gods, goddesses and saints that outlines the Hindu firmament. Shiva and Vishnu appear in several different incarnations. In other works, Shiva is accompanied by his consort, Uma (known as Parvati in northern India). In the show's three "Somaskanda" images, he appears with Uma and their son Skanda. Uma, for her part, is present as the war goddess Durga or as the fierce Kali. The fabulously full-bodied, elephant-headed Ganesh, another son of Shiva and Uma, is also here, then as now one of the most popular forms for both Hindu believers and sculptors. There is a spectacular figure of Uma as the 10th-century Chola Queen Sembiyan Mahadevi, one of the dynasty's first and greatest patrons. (The bronze dancing Shiva form was an innovation of her workshops.) Also represented are several of the Tamil poet-saints, the sometimes humble, sometimes noble beings whose spontaneous poems became part of the temple liturgy under the Chola.

From the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., comes its famous Mother of Karaikkal, an ancient ascetic whose upright skeletal form nearly vibrates with religious fervor. From the Cleveland Museum of Art, there is a serene yet forceful image of Vishnu as his lion-man avatar, Yogi Narasimha, sitting in a yoga position, his legs folded in front of him (and encircled by a yoga band) two of his four elbows resting on his knees. Basking in the radiance of this extraordinary being, it is pertinent to recall that muddled descriptions of animal-headed, multiarmed figures like this caused Europeans to demonize Indian sculpture, contributing mightily to its art-historical neglect.

While this exhibition will undoubtedly help specialists establish dates and provenance in royal and regional workshops, the opportunities to make stylistic and iconographical distinctions can be enjoyed by anyone. Consider, for example, the changing proportions, from elliptical to full-circle, of the Shiva Lord of Dance aureole, or the varying postures and expressions of the squirming dwarflike figure on which he stands. (That is Mushalagan, who represents darkness and ignorance.) Consider, too, the way the limbs of some figures curve and swell, while others are relatively straight; the way shoulders are sloped or exaggerated in width; the way some girdles seem almost part of the flesh as in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's pair of small images of Shiva and Uma, for example while elsewhere they encase the figure almost like armor.

To Hindu worshippers, these extraordinary objects existed only at extremes, as either cosmic substance or dumb matter: they were either enlivened by the god's spirit or, once the rite or procession was over and the god had departed, they were an inanimate piece of household metal that needed to be vigorously and unceremoniously scrubbed before being resanctified. They were neither viewed nor fetishized as art. In fact, they were barely seen at all, given the amount of paraphernalia heaped upon them for their public outings.

Even so, visual contact called darshan, which literally translates as "seeing and being seen by God" is the essential form of Hindu religious experience, the moment of blessing. In fact, eye contact is so essential that if an image's eyes were worn away by touching or cleansing, they were usually recarved into the face as is the case with several works here. In addition, Hindu belief dictates that inner beauty and grace be reflected on the outside: beauty of form, proportion, gesture, expression and detail.

Nothing not an angle of a palm or the bend of a finger is without meaning, devoid of symbolism or purely decorative. Shiva's earrings are always mismatched, to represent men and women. But with or without a deep understanding of Hinduism and its elaborate symbolism, these works communicate a beauty that is at once profoundly human and formally radical. It has everything do to with seeing.

The Indian sculptors, in particular the Chola bronze sculptors, negotiated a truce between geometry and the organic, the abstract and the realistic, that is almost unknown to Western sculpture. The Egyptians achieved something similar, but they never set it in motion. This Indian sculpture, influenced by dance, was able to do. A kind of ecstatic clarity of living form resulted, expressed in the continuous play between taut curving lines and smooth curving planes.

No matter what angle you view them from, the Chola bronzes at the Sackler almost invariably present the viewer with a simultaneous sense of crisp profile and a soft volume that adds up to an extraordinary sense of unity, of seeing everything at once in a microcosmic flash of revelation.