Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c32.3

c32.3

I have since seen reason to doubt the somewhat simple solutions of the difficulties thus provided, and to believe that the influence of Greek on Indian Art, however extensive at a certain period, was ultimately neither very profound nor very important. It is the concentration of attention upon the effeminate and artistically unimportant work of the Gandhāra school that has given undue prominence to the Greek influence.§ It must be admitted also that a certain prejudice has led European investigators to think of Classic Greece naturally as the source of all art, and to suppose that the influence of Classic Art must have been as permanently important in the East as in the West. At the same time, it is to be remembered that it is not generally realised by Western scholars, who are not always artists, that Eastern Art, whether Indian, or Chinese, has a value and significance not less than that of the Western Art of any time. The main difficulty so far seems to have been that Indian Art has been studied only by archæologists. It is not archæologists, but artists, or at any rate students of art rather than of archæology, who are best qualified to judge of the significance of works of art considered as art, and to unravel the influences apparent in them. No artist, familiar with the true genius of Indian art, could suppose that the work of the Gandhāra school was the real foundation of Indian figure sculpture, or that Indian art could have been founded on such a decadent Greeko-Roman basis.