The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c12.18

c12.18

If further confirmation of the date of this fragment is needed, it is furnished by three of the celestial beings at the left side of the fragment. One of these is the winged angel at the top. In sculptures of the Early Indian School winged angels are the rule rather than the exception, but in the Gandhāra School they are very rare, and are found, so far as I know, only in work of this early period. The second is the *deva* with drooping moustache and twisted turban, standing immediately below the angel. He bears a quite remarkable likeness to a figure of chloritized micaceous schist which I unearthed at the Dharmarājikā at Taxila in 1913 (fig. 60). Such a striking similarity makes it impossible to doubt that both pieces came from the same atelier, if not from the hand of the same sculptor. The third is the lowest one of the *deva* figures with a brush instead of a drooping moustache. Celestial beings with this particular kind of moustache were one of the stock types in the early art of Gandhāra, but the type does not seem to have survived for more than two or three generations.