Mediaeval Sinhalese Art c32.4

c32.4

So far from foreigners having given to India the ideal type of Buddha, the Gandhāra sculptures should perhaps be regarded as the work of late Greeko-Roman craftsmen striving in vain to interpret Indian ideals. The sculptures themselves show how little of value in the Western world had at this time to offer to the East. History repeats itself: the result of foreign influence on Indian art during the first few centuries of the Christian era, was not, perhaps, of any more value than the influence of Western art on Indian at the present day. The zenith of Greek art was in the fifth century B.C., if not earlier; the zenith of Indian art, in times certainly later than the third century A.D. The sequence of cause and effect would be hard to trace; it was not of the decadence of the one, that the achievement of the other was born.