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

l8o • ROMANO-INDIAN ART
esque art, is represented seated on a rainbow.
On either side rise slender colonnettes with
extremely conventionalized Corinthian capitals.
The space behind the figure is filled with
heraldically drawn lotus buds falling from the
sky. In this particular style at Bamiyan there is a
mixture of elements drawn from many sources,
both Western and Indian, that results in the
formation of a really original manner, in much
the same way that a coalescence of Classical and
Oriental forms produced the style of Byzantium
in the First Golden Age.
Analysing the elements of this Central Asian
style one by one, we note first of all that the
drapery of the figure, especially the drawing of
the flying scarves, bears a marked resemblance
to the neo-Attic drapery of the Gandhara
Bodhisattvas. There are slight suggestions of
the arbitrary shading of the Indian tradition.
The completely frontal, static, and rather frozen
quality of the conception is immediately reminiscent
of the completely Sasanian paintings in
the niche of the one-hundred-and-twenty-foot
Buddha. The colour scheme is dominated by
the lapis-lazuli blue of the robe and the background.
This beautiful ultramarine presumably
came from the famous mines at Badakshan
that also supplied the Roman market with this
precious mineral. The most notable stylistic
feature of the painting is the definition of both
contour and form by hard, wiry lines of even
thickness. It is the combination of line drawing
and areas of flat, brilliant colour that gives the
composition such a heraldic appearance and
most closely relates it to the painting of Central
Asia, notably the paintings of Kizil. The same
combination of line and brilliant tone with no
interest in the definition of plastic form imparts
an extraordinarily ghostly character to the
figure of the Bodhisattva, and is the prototype
for much of T'ang Buddhist painting and the
famous cycle of paintings at Horyuji in Nara.
Although the surviving paintings at Bamiyan
are perhaps the most famous and best preserved,
they are by no means the only examples of
painting in Afghanistan from the second to the
seventh centuries a.d. In an isolated monastery
at Fondukistan in the Ghorband Valley were
found decorations of an almost completely
Sasanian style. These, like the fragments of
sculpture found at the same site, probably
belong to the very last period of Buddhism in
Afghanistan, approximately the seventh century
A.D. At this time large portions of the northern
and central sections of Afghanistan were ruled
by Hunnish or Hephthalite vassals of the
Sasanian Dynasty in Iran. 20 The painted clay
figure of a Bodhisattva from Fondukistan [124]
serves to show to what a remarkable degree a
completely Indian style has at the last replaced
the earlier reliance on Classical and Iranian
prototypes. This image is in a way a sculptural
counterpart of the Indian forms in the paintings
at Bamiyan. The perfect realization of this
entirely relaxed and warmly voluptuous body,
sunk in sensuous reverie, is as exquisite as anything
to be found in the art of Gupta India. The
modelling, in its definition of softness of flesh
and precision of ornament, is only the final and
entirely typical accomplishment of a tradition
going back to the beginnings of Indian art. The
extraordinarily affected elegance and grace of
this figure and its exquisite and frail refinement
appear as a Mannerist development out of the
Gupta style, a mode that seems to anticipate
the Tantric art of Nepal [cf. 202]. 21
A fragmentary Buddha from this same site is
of interest both stylistically and iconographically
[125]. As will become clear when we turn to the
analysis of Gupta sculpture in a later chapter,
this figure is in several respects a reflexion of
this great Indian style. The head is a plastic
compromise between the dry, mask-like treatment
of Gandhara and the fullness of Kushan
Buddhas, and, as in innumerable fifth-century
Indian Buddhas, the hair is represented by
snail-shell curls. The robe, indicated by grooves
incised before the clay was baked, is still in the