Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c7.130

c7.130

If the peculiarities of Indian religious sculpture and painting were, as archæologists suggest, only such as are found in the art of all early states of civilisation, in the crude attempts of savage races and in the untutored scrawlings of childhood, we should certainly discover in Indian art, as in the art of every Western nation, a steady progression towards a more perfect naturalism in the highest ideals of the human figure, following the general advance in technical skill and artistic culture. But what we actually find is that Indian sculptors who, before they came into contact with the Græco-Roman school of Gandhara, had developed, as we can see in the Bharhut and Sanchi sculptures, no mean skill in a naturalistic treatment of the human body, deliberately went further and further from the naturalistic ideals of Greek art, although they advanced far beyond the technical skill shown in the Gandharan type, which seems to have been their starting-point in evolving their own ideal of the image of Buddha.