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

ROMANO-INDIAN
IsO •
ART
95. Wima Kadphises from Mathura
Muttra, Archaeological Museum
It-
96 {opposite). Kanishka from Mathura.
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Muttra, Archaeological Museum
continuation of the Indian figure style. The
image has a massiveness and crudity immediately
suggestive of fragmentary Iranian
portrait-statues of the Parthian Period published
by Herzfeld. 3 It might be mentioned,
too, that the precise carving of the ornamental
border of the cloth draped over the throne
reveals an almost exact copy of the designs of
woven silks from Palmyra - one more indication
of the close commercial and cultural links
between the Kushan Empire and the West.
The companion statue of Kanishka [96] is
identified by an inscription cut across the
bottom of the mantle: 'The great King, the
King of Kings, His Majesty Kanishka'. The
statue shows the monarch standing rigidly
frontal, his hands resting on sword and mace.
The statue is headless, but the resemblance of
the whole to the likeness of Kanishka on his
coins is so close that one could reconstruct the
image by adding the massive bearded head with
.i*
peaked cap that we invariably see in the coinportraits
[65 G and h]. Kanishka in this official
statue is clad in a stiff mantle and heavy, padded
boots of a type still found in Gilgit. This
costume, so entirely unsuited to the heat of
Mathura, was perhaps assumed for ceremonial
purposes, since it is a dress imported from the
homeland of the Kushan invaders. No effigy of
an Assyrian king or Roman Caesar gives a
stronger impression of authority and power
than this image of the conqueror from the
steppes, an effect conveyed by the arrogant pose
and the hieratic, almost idol-like rigidity of the
form. The image is rather like a relief disengaged
from its background with no suggestion
of three-dimensional existence. It consists of
hardly more than a stone slab carved into the
silhouette of a cloaked figure. The whole
emphasis is on the eccentric silhouette provided
by the sharp and angular lines of the military
mantle, exactly as in the coin-portraits of the
same ruler. The indication of drapery consists
only of crudely incised serpentine lines across