Place · Western Chalukya temple · India
Mahādeva Temple, Itagi
The 1112 CE Shiva temple at Itagi in Koppal district, Karnataka — called the 'emperor of temples' (devalaya chakravarti) in its own foundation inscription — commissioned by Mahadeva Dandanayaka, the general of Western Chalukya king Vikramaditya VI. The Mahadeva Temple is the finest surviving work of Western Chalukya architecture, with four shrines around a central mandapa, an exceptional 'turned' hall with 68 pillars, and a 17-metre shikhara that preserves the Chalukya transition from the Dravida-Nagara hybrid to the Hoysala experimentation. The star-shaped base plan was taken up by the Hoysalas at Belur (1117) and Halebidu (1121) in the following decade. The temple's intact 12th-century sculpture programme makes Itagi a working document of the late Chalukya workshop.
- Function
- Sacred site & pilgrimage
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 15.460, 76.330
Connections (3)
- Teaching lineageKāśivisveśvara, Lakkundi
Itagi and Lakkundi are the two poles of the Western Chalukya style: Lakkundi the laboratory, a village with a cluster of small temples, a stepwell and a Jain basadi where the lathe-turned pillar and the stepped-diamond plan were worked out, and Itagi the resolved result of 1112, called in its own inscription the emperor among temples. Between them sit about eighty years and the whole development of the manner.
- Architectural modelBelur Chennakeshava
The Western Chalukya idiom at Itagi — the lathe-turned pillar, the stepped-diamond plan, the soapstone surface — is the architectural link between the Chalukya temples of the Tungabhadra country and the Hoysala ones a hundred and fifty kilometres south. The Hoysalas were Chalukya feudatories before they were independent, and their masons were working in this vocabulary before they pushed it to the density of Belur.
- Teaching lineageHalebidu Hoysaleswara
Western Chalukya soapstone becomes Hoysala soapstone: the same material, the same lathe-turned pillars, the same taste for a surface worked past the point of architecture. What the Hoysalas added was the star plan and a density of carving that nobody had attempted before. The Hoysalas were Chalukya feudatories until the 1190s, so the transmission is institutional as much as stylistic — the same masons, under new patrons.
On these journeys
Sources
History of India — Wikipedia
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