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

l82 ROMANO-INDIAN ART
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Gandhara style, but the bodily form is conceived
with a suggestion of mass that is entirely
Indian. What is of peculiar iconographical
interest is the three-pointed, jewel-studded
chasuble that the Buddha wears over the
monastic garment. This attribute, as well as the
heavy earrings - seemingly inappropriate for
one who had renounced worldly riches - are
a symbolical device to indicate that this is
Buddha in his transcendent, glorified form, the
apotheosis in which he reveals himself to the
host of Bodhisattvas. It is quite possible that
originally Hinayana statues of the monastic
Buddha were transformed into Mahayana icons
of the transfigured Sakyamuni by being 'dressed
up' in actual jewels and garments which in time
came to be represented in statues like the one
from Fondukistan. The so-called 'bejewelled
Buddha' is seen in many statues of the last phase
of Mahayana Buddhism in India and in the art
of regions like Tibet, Nepal, and Indonesia
which were directly influenced by the Buddhism
of Bengal from the eighth to the late twelfth
century.
The art of Fondukistan is in many respects a
flamboyant phase of the classic elements
inherent in Gandhara and Gupta sculpture and
painting. To apply the word Mannerist to this
phenomenon is perhaps a dangerous parallel,
but it is evident that this art contains many
strangely anti-classical elements that certainly
indicate the appearance of a new aesthetic.
the examples of this late phase of classic
Buddhist art, as we see it at Teppe Marandjan,
at Fondukistan, at Bamiyan, every effort was
directed towards the graceful, the elegant, the
provocative, and towards a kind of refined
realism that achieved a new poetry in the very
distortion of the forms, an erotic, world-weary
expressiveness suggestive of the German sculptor
Lehmbruck. It will become apparent, too,
that this transplanted Gupta art was never
entirely understood when it was copied in the
Buddhist oases on the road to China.
In
125. Buddha from Fondukistan.
Paris, Musee Guimet