The Beginnings of Buddhist Art and Other Essays in Indian and Central-Asian Archaeology c8.14

c8.14

Look at it at leisure. Without doubt you will appreciate its dreamy, and even somewhat effeminate, beauty; but at the same time you cannot fail to be struck by its Hellenic character. That this is a statue of Buddha there is not the least doubt : all the special signs of which I was speaking a short time ago bear witness to its identity. Is it necessary to make you lay your fingers upon that ample monastic robe, that pretended bump of wisdom on the crown of the head, that mole between the eyebrows, that lobe of the ear distended by the wearing of heavy earrings, and left bare because of the total renunciation of worldly adornments? These are all traits which we might have anticipated from the perusal of the sacred texts. But, if it is indeed a Buddha, it is no less evidently not an Indian work. Your European eyes have in this case no need of the help of any Indianist, in order to appreciate with full knowledge the orb of the nimbus, the waves of the hair, the straightness of the profile, the classical shape of the eyes, the sinuous bow of the mouth, the supple and hollow folds of the draperies. All these technical details, and still more perhaps the harmony of the whole, indicate in a material, palpable and striking manner the hand of an artist from some Greek studio. If the material proofs of the attribution constitute what I should be prepared to call the native contribution, neither will you hesitate to ascribe to an occidental influence the formal beauty of the work. Thus the statue of Mardân, with all its congeners, appears to us as a kind of compromise, a hybrid work, which would not in any language have a name, had not the no less heteroclite term of « Greco-Buddhist » been forthwith invented for it.