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

ROMANO-INDIAN
132
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ART
same as had been used in the Maurya and Sunga
Periods for representations of yakshas. The
Gandhara Bodhisattvas are all shown wearing
turbans, jewellery, and muslin skirts -a costume
that is certainly a literal adaption of the actual
dress of Kushan and Indian nobles. The jewellery
of these royal statues may be duplicated in
the finds of Hellenistic and Sarmatian gold
unearthed at Taxila and elsewhere. The style
of these Bodhisattva images is a mixture of
techniques of Western origin, so that, for example,
the stiff swallow-tail folds of the dhoti are
obviously an adaptation of the neo-Attic style
that flourished in Rome under Hadrian, and
the carving of the faces varies from imitation of
Roman models to a rigid and hard precision
suggestive of the grave figures of Palmyra.
Another definite borrowing from Roman art
in the Peshawar Valley was the method of representing
the story of the Buddha legend in a
series of separate episodes, in much the same
way that the pictorial iconography of the Christian
legend was based on the approved Roman
method of portraying the careers of the Caesars
by a number of distinct climactic events in
separate panels. It will be noted that this is a
break from the device of continuous narration
that was inevitably employed in the ancient
Indian schools.
The Gandhara reliefs show no less stylistic
variety than the statues of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.
They reveal once again a dependence
on Roman and Indian art of many different
periods : certain reliefs in which figures of definitely
Classical type are isolated against a plain
background are reminiscent of the Flavian revival
of the Greek style ofthe Great Period; others,
in which complicated masses of forms are relieved
against a deeply cut, shadowed background,
display the method of the early Andhra
reliefs at Sanchi which in a way approximates
the 'illusionism' of Roman relief of the Constantinian
Period. Gandhara relief sculpture owes
its rather puzzling character to the fact that it
is
technically an impossible mixture of archaic
and developed styles of carving: the narrative
method and conceptual point of view of the old
Indian schools combined with the illusionistic
spatial experiments of Roman art of the
Imperial Period.
The first type of relief may be illustrated by a
steatite panel of a stair-riser from a site in the
Buner region [71]. Although sometimes identified
as the Presentation of the Bride to Prince
71. Dionysian scene from the Buner region.
Cambridge, Mass., B. Rowland
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