The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c7.43

c7.43

But these are questions reserved for specialists, and, doubtless, many of you are more concerned for the æsthetic value, than for the documentary interest, of these old monuments. From this point of view you cannot have failed to appreciate the perfect naturalness of the artists who worked at them, and I do not hesitate to praise above all the justness of their observation — so remarkable especially in their animals and trees — and the freedom of their execution, in spite of a certain clumsiness and a very pardonable ignorance of our perspective. You divine also what a delicate problem is raised as to the determination of the exact place of their works in the general history of art. I do not think that anyone can reasonably contest the statement that this school of Barhut and of Sânchî is a direct expression of Indian genius, with all the spontaneousness and conventionality to be found in either. And in making this statement I am not thinking only of fundamentals, of the thoroughly indigenous character of the subjects which the art proposed to treat : even as regards its specially technical proceedings, that extremely deeply incised relief, that constant search for swarming effects, that systematic overcrowding of the whole available space in the panel by accessory details, it is in the hereditary habits of the wood and ivory carvers of ancient India, not forgetting its goldsmiths, that I should seek their origin. But, if ancient Buddhist art is thus attached by all its roots to its native soil, we should have to be wilfully blind not to see the foreign shoots which have already ingrafted themselves on this wild stock. A quantity of decorative motives have appeared to us so directly borrowed from Persia that their importation can scarcely be explained otherwise than by an immigration of Iranian artisans. But this is not all : here and there, in bold foreshortenings, in the skilful placing of three-quarter length figures, in the harmonious balancing of groups — in a word, in the detail of the working process, as also in the general arrangement of the composition — we detect growing traces of an influence more subtle and more difficult to disentangle, but incomparably more artistic, which in fact had by the vicissitudes of political history been brought much nearer, the influence of Hellenistic models. Moreover, we now know from a reliable source that this influence had already penetrated as far as there; and the native artists of Vidiçâ could see quite close to their town the column which had been raised on behalf of a local râjah in the reign of the Indo-Greek king Antialkidas (about 175 B. C.) by the envoy Heliodoros, son of Dion, a native of Taxilâ (¹).