Indian Art: A History of Indian Art from the Earliest Times up to the Third Century A.D. c11.139

c11.139

Commenting on the art of the lion-capital Sir John Marshall has observed, "The Sarnath capital, on the other hand, though by no means a masterpiece, is the product of the most developed art of which the world was cognizant in the 3rd century B. C., the handiwork of one who had generations of artistic effort and experience behind him. The masterful strength of the crowning lions with their swollen veins and tense muscular development and in the spirited realism of the reliefs below, there is no trace whatever of the imitations of primitive art. So far as naturalism was his aim, the sculptor has modelled the figures direct from nature and has delineated, their form with bold faithful touch, but he has done more than this, he has consciously and of set purpose infused a tectonic conventional spirit in to the four lions, so as to bring them into harmony with the architectural character of the monument. Equally mature is the technique of his relief work. In early Greek sculpture it was the practice to compress the relief between two fixed planes, the original front plane of the statue and the plane of the background. In the reliefs of the Sarnath capital there is no trace, whatever of this process; each and every part of the animal is modelled according to its actual depth without a reference to an ideal front plane, with the result that it presents the appearance almost of a figure in the round which has been cut in half and then applied to the background of the abacus".