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

ROMANO-INDIAN
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ART
on individual expression, in much the same way
that the mystical Christianity of the thirteenth
century brought into being a new and humanized
style of artistic expression.
The stucco head of a devatd in the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston [112], is a particularly fine
example of this type of sculpture. It does not
come from Hadda, but from one of the countless
ruin sites around Peshawar that have been
robbed by local treasure-hunters for generations.
6 It should be noted at this point, in order
to explain the great preponderance of stucco
heads from both Afghan and north-west Indian
sites, that the bodies to which these heads were
attached were made of mud with only an outer
slip of lime-plaster that has long since crumbled
to dust. Examining the Boston head in detail,
we find that the upper part of the face has
apparently been made with a mould, as is
in. Head of Brahmin ascetic from Hadda.
Pans. Musee Guimet
suggested by the sharpness and dryness of the
planes. But the soft,
wavy hair and the mouth
and chin were modelled free-hand with extraordinary
vivacity and freshness. A slight
asymmetry in this and other examples adds to
of Amiens [i 1 1]. In many cases there is certainly
a marked resemblance in the quality of spirituality
in the features, the same modified realism
found in thirteenth-century Gothic art. This
the aliveness and piquancy of expression. 7
The collection of sculpture from Hadda and
the later sites at Taxila is, in a sense, a persistence
rather than a reappearance of the
supposed anticipation of Gothic art in
Asia a
eclectic repertory of the Hellenistic-Augustan
thousand years before the carving of Chartres
period.
In the same way the scores of typical
and Rheims is not so remarkable if we pause to
consider that, just as the art of Hadda is
ultimately Roman or Hellenistic in origin, with
a strong suggestion of the Hellenistic emphasis
on passionate and pathetic expression, so, too,
Gothic sculpture, especially the finest examples
of the school in the carvings of Rheims and
Gandharan masks of Buddha are the perpetuation
of a more purely Indian hieratic mould.
In other words, while preserving the drily
spiritualized formula of early Gandhara art for
the Buddha image, the sculptors of Taxila and
Hadda in the fifth century, in lay figures and
grotesques, present a living array of types which
Amiens, are
unquestionably based on Classic
is
without doubt the end of a style that had its
prototypes.
There is also a spiritual explanation for the
similarity : the emotional, more personal type of
Buddhism, with its emphasis on salvation, that
developed in the early centuries of this era came
to demand an artistic emphasis on the individual
beginnings in the early, most Classical phase of
Gandhara art. The vitality of the late sculpture
of north-western India is strongly suggestive of
the dynamic character of Roman provincial art
the so-called Gothic' character of the Hadda
sculpture is far from difficult to reconcile with