Indian Sculpture and Painting, Illustrated by Typical Masterpieces, with an Explanation of their Motives and Ideals c7.138

c7.138

The Gandharan sculptors were, therefore, mere craftsmen, and very inferior craftsmen, compared with those of Pompeii and Herculaneum ; hirelings following more or less impure Hellenic traditions, and engaged by the kings of Gandhara, on the north-west frontier of India, to work under the orders of the Indian Buddhist monks. Their art, so far as it was Hellenic, was the dying art of Greece degraded into an inferior handicraft. The old Attic fire had burnt itself out, and Indian thought was trying to rekindle the embers with the fervent ardour of a new faith and a new ideal.