aesthetic for who?

As I read just a little about the background to these images, questions arise. Who was this exquisite aesthetic really for? Images like this one - and this is true of many of the Chola bronzes - were designed to be carried through the streets in processions. Not only would they have been held high above people's heads, the images would also have been decorated with jewellery and flower garlands. So ordinary people wouldn't have seen their beautiful adornments and serene faces hardly at all.

Similarly, the larger bronze images, which look so extraordinary in their dark, backlit display in a museum in the States somewhere, would have been installed in the centre of the temple, and also festooned with clothing and jewellery and flowers. The only people who would have seen the perfect proportions, the beautiful inscribed jewellery, the subtle suggestions of fine clothing, would have been the image-maker and the priest.

I don't know what recent academic studies have to say about this, but these fairly unequivocal facts about the use of these images have got me thinking. This aesthetic seems not to have been, ultimately, about pleasing the onlooker.  And it also was probably not about individual 'artistic expression' as we might understand it. Although there are times when sculptors did leave their names on inscriptions, and some images that show an aesthetic vision and technical skill that might distinguish one image, or set of images, from another, critics from outside the culture have pointed out that this aesthetic is in some ways formulaic, precisely not individual and 'free'.

So who was it for?