The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c14.12

c14.12

Other minor developments of a decorative or stylistic kind that distinguish the work of this period will be noticed in the descriptions of the individual sculptures. Meanwhile I have, I think, said enough to make it clear that the sculpture of the Mature period falls naturally into two groups or phases, namely, an earlier phase in which the sculptor's work unmistakably reflects his personal taste and imagination, and a later phase in which the sculptor makes perfection of technique his principal aim, and is content, at the cost of his own creative artistry, to ring the changes on stock themes and stock modes of handling them. According to my calculations, the first of these phases lasted for a few decades only, from the close of the first century until about A.D. 140: the second from that date until the break-up of the Kushān Empire three generations later.