WHAT weighs more than 1,815kg, lives on a remote island and can only travel by boat during India’s dry seasons? Answer: five ancient limestone sculptures that needed to somehow arrive in New York – via crate, pontoon barge, ferry over the Krishna River and truck to an airport in Hyderabad.
Now imagine the logistics involved in shipping another 120 or so rare Buddhist objects – dozens of which had never left India and many with their own sets of hurdles – to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, and you will have some sense of the challenges encountered by the curators of its new exhibition: “Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE-400 CE.”
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