The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c16.18

c16.18

Love of the decorative was, and still is, inherent in the Indian temperament, and in the Early Indian School it was constantly asserting itself in one direction or another. Thus, among the few selected examples of the Sāñchī sculptures illustrated in figs. 1-12 we drew attention to the decorative design of the lotus plant in fig. 2 and to the decorative handling of the fleeing hosts of Māra in fig. 7. This instinctive feeling for the decorative which is a hall-mark of Indian art at all ages becomes increasingly apparent in the art of Gandhāra in the latter part of the second century A.D., and there can be little doubt that this spread of Indian influence resulted from the closer contacts between India and Gandhāra after the extension of Kushān rule over Central India and Hindustān. The first effect of this influence was to impart a certain quiet charm to compositions which were tending to become stilted and formal—such compositions, I mean, as those illustrated in figs. 117 and 118. But this initial charm soon wore thin, for though the sculptors of Gandhāra might imitate with some success the superficial embellishments of Indian art, they could not absorb the innate genius of the Indian for the decorative, and so, in the long run, Indian influence led to little more than the display of multiple figures in formal, sometimes geometric, array, or to conventional and sterile designs in which architecture played an increasingly dominant part.