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

170 ROMANO-INDIAN ART
Roman provincial art/ since this same quality
is present in monuments made by the
'barbarians' on all the fringes of the Roman
world empire. The 'realism' of Germanic
carvings, like the heads in the Neumagen
Memorial, for instance, differs from early
Roman portraits in its intensity and heightened
impressionistic treatment just like the similar
heads from Hadda. 9 The quality of pathos and
dynamic realism that we note in late Roman,
Byzantine, and north-west Indian work at
Taxila and Hadda is really the modification of a
tendency already dominant in Hellenistic art,
and not the sudden and simultaneous result of
some vague aesthetic force asserting itself on all
the
boundaries of the Roman world.
One could say in explanation of the expressheness
of late Gandhara art that, just as
neo-Platonism introduced spiritual, even supernatural,
life into the art of the Late Antique
Period in the Mediterranean world, Buddhism
- especially the various Mahayana cults emphasizing
salvation -may in part have been responsible
for the spiritual qualities, the 'soul', in this
manifestation of the Late Antique in Asia.
Again, the persistence of an essentially
realistic tradition in sculpture with an emphasis
on the pathetic-dramatic type of Hellenistic art,
side by side with the hieratic cult image, is not
too difficult to explain in a region whose population,
especially the artist population, was until
the very end of the school in part Western or
Eurasian in character, having the same humanist
heritage as the artists of Byzantium. It was no
more strange for the dynamic realistic tradition
of Hellenistic art to survive with the official and
frozen Buddhist cult image than it was for
generations of artists in the Byzantine world to
perpetuate, largely in profane art, the remembered
realistic style of Late Greek art at the
same time that the forms of Christ and his saints
remained frozen and abstract in the appropriate
golden world of mosaic. In the same way that
the survival of a realistic, dramatic, and colouristic
tradition in Byzantine neo-Hellenistic art
led eventually to the humanist art of the Gothic
period, so the surviving Hellenistic art of the
first century a.d. in north-western India culminated
in the so-called Gothic art of Hadda.
Certain dramatic archaeological discoveries
within recent years are bound to affect our
judgement of the sculpture of Hadda and its
place in the evolution of classical art in Asia.
The Late Hellenistic or Greco-Bactrian clay
sculpture found in the Kushan palace at
Khalchayan in Uzbekistan (U.S.S.R.), dating
from the first century B.C., appears as a direct
antecedent of the many Hellenistic elements in
the Hadda stuccoes. 10 The most recent finds at
Tapa-i-Shotur at Hadda 11 have revealed a
wealth of new material, including the extraordinary
plastic stucco ensemble of the Buddha's
encounter with the Naga Apalala. 12 The
hundreds of statues in relief uncovered at this
site are of very high quality and can probably be
dated as early as the second or third century
a.d. The arrangement of the complex itself, as
well as the style of many individual statues,
appears to have a distinct relationship to
examples of belated Hellenistic sculpture in
Russian Central Asia, as, for instance, the
famous frieze dedicated to local river gods at
Pyandhzikent. 13
A site important not only for Indian art, but
even more for its intimate relationship to the art
of Iran and Central Asia, is the great monastic
establishment at Bamiyan, dramatically overlooking
a fertile valley between the Hindu Kush
range and the Koh-i-Baba in north central
Afghanistan. This beautiful and romantic site
of former Buddhist power has been described
by the Chinese pilgrim Hsiian-tsang, who
visited it in the seventh century. Legend has it
that Genghis Khan put the entire population of
Bamiyan to the sword. In the nineteenth
century it was visited by many early adventurers
in Afghanistan, and it was here that the British
captives were housed during the First Afghan