The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c15.16

c15.16

In my excavations at the Dharmarājikā Stūpa at Taxila I found several fragments of much larger panels depicting the same 'Sleeping Women' scene¹ (cf. *Taxila*, vol. II, pp. 713-14, nos. 98-100), one of which is shown in fig. 93. It exhibits three sleeping figures, with traces of a fourth at the right-hand top corner. One of the three is seated on a high-backed wicker chair with legs crossed and arm bent to support her drooping head; another, on the left, rests her head against her hand; the third, in the background, holds a six-stringed instrument. In this, as in other fragments of the same kind from the Dharmarājikā, the shapes of the women are strikingly rounded and full, and their thin clinging draperies serve well to reveal the lines of their figures. This marks a new development in Gandhāra art. Roughly speaking, there are two diametrically opposite methods of representing the folds of drapery. One, which was the normal Greek method, was to cut away the mass of the fabric, leaving the folds projecting from the surface, as they naturally do. The other method, which was commonly favoured by Roman sculptors, was to indicate the folds merely by deep-cut shadow lines, leaving the mass of material between them intact. Of these two methods it was the Greek one that was universally followed by the sculptors of Gandhāra in the first and second centuries A.D. and, whatever variations were introduced, the underlying principle remained the same. Thus, if we compare fig. 93 with, for example, fig. 57, we see that in both cases the sculptor was following the Greek practice, the only difference between them being that, whereas in the earlier work the draperies were thicker and looser and the folds more numerous and heavy, in the later the draperies were thin and tight-fitting while the folds were kept sparse and slight so as to bring out the shapeliness of the forms beneath and interfere as little as possible with the clarity of the composition as a whole. And an added advantage, of course, was that this treatment reduced the labour of chiselling to a minimum without unduly sacrificing either charm or effectiveness. In the above generalization I have naturally not taken account of the hasty and slovenly method of depicting draperies exemplified in figs. 58 and 59, where superficially incised lines are used, with a sort of pictorial effect, to represent the folds.