The art and architecture of India - Buddhist, Hindu, Jain (Art Ebook)

ROMANO-INDIAN
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126
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ART
merlon crenellation, and fantastic monsters like
the sphinx and gryphon, had already been assimilated
by the ancient Indian schools. Other
forms, such as the atlantids, garland-bearing
erotes, and semi-human creatures like the centaur,
triton, and hippocamp, were all part of the
repertory of Hellenistic art introduced by the
Romanized Eurasian artists in the service of the
Kushan court.
What we refer to as Gandhara art - that is,
the sculpture of the Peshawar Valley dedicated
to Buddhism - probably had its beginnings in
the later decades of the first century a.d. under
the patronage of the first Kushan emperors to
rule in north-western India. The theory that a
Hellenistic school of art existed in Bactria as a
background for the Gandhara school can no
longer be discounted. The present excavation
of a Bactrian Greek city at Ay Khanum is
destined to change our whole conception of the
intrusion of Hellenic art into Asia. The finding
not only of Corinthian capitals but also of fragmentary
statues
of gods and heroes and the
laureated portrait of a prince or magistrate
demonstrates for the first time the existence of a
school of Greek sculpture in Bactria. Even
though this art and the civilization which enacted
it were wiped out by the Saka invasion, at
least the memory of this Hellenistic foundation
may lie behind the school of Gandhara. But, as
will be demonstrated, the character of this
Indo-Classical style can only be explained by
contacts with the Roman world. 9
The chronology of the sculpture of the Peshawar
Valley still remains a vexing problem, owing
largely to the absence of any definitely datable
monuments. A number of pieces of sculpture
do bear inscriptions with a reckoning in years of
an unspecified area. 10 It is, however, possible to
arrive at a tentative chronology for this material
especially with the help of monuments datable
by reference to the works of Roman art which
they closely resemble. Among the earliest examples
is the famous reliquary of King Kanishka,
which bears a date from the first year of the
ruler's reign [73]. Like all Gandhara primitives,
its style is a mixture of the archaic formulae of
the early Indian school combined with iconographical
borrowings from the West, such as
the garland-bearing erotes circling the drum of
the casket. The stucco sculptures ornamenting
the base of Kanishka's pagoda, Shah-ji-ki-
Dheri, belonged to the same style and period.
The earliest Buddhas datable by inscriptions
belong to the second and third centuries a.d. 11
They reveal a style of drapery clearly derived
from Roman workmanship of the Imperial
Period. The very latest examples from such
Afghan sites as Begram, the ancient Kapisa,
have the drapery reduced to a net of string-like
folds, very much in the manner of the sculpture
of Palmyra on the trade route to the Mediterranean.
12 The proportions of the body have a
ratio of five heads to the total height, exactly as
in late Roman and Early Christian sculpture.
The soft, effeminate Apollonian facial type of
the early Buddha statues gradually assumes the
mask-like, frozen character of Late Antique
sculpture that prevails over the Roman world
from the third to the fifth centuries a.d.
The Gandhara school is usually credited with
the first representation of the Buddha in anthropomorphic
form. The portrayal of Sakyamuni
as a man, rather than as a symbol, probably is
linked with the emergence of devotional sects of
Buddhism at the time of Kanishka's Great
Council. The quality of bhakti or devotion in the
later Buddhist sects demanded a representation
of the master in an accessible human form. 13
The earliest Buddha images were a compound of
iconographical and technical formulae adapted
by the foreign sculptors from the repertory of
the Late Antique world. Images of this type
appear on Kanishka's coins [65 h], one may
imagine, as part of this sovereign's propagandizing
of the Buddhist religion. These representations,
like those on Kanishka's reliquary [73],
are in a way abstract or simplified by reason of