The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c11.17

c11.17

Finally, and as a tail-piece to this chapter, I append a particularly fine statue of a crouching Atlant in the Lahore Museum (fig. 52). Such Atlants are familiar at all periods in Gandhāra art and afford, as we shall see, an instructive series of pointers for its history (see figs. 108, 145 and 146). This example, made of the same stone and approximately of the same age as fig. 51, is one of the oldest. It is a bold, masterly figure, with narrow waist and powerfully developed chest and limbs, and rather crudely modelled wings. The leafy wreath twined in the hair points to the influence of the Dionysus-Silenus cult.