The Buddhist Art of Gandhara: The Story of the Early School, its Birth, Growth and Decline c9.7

c9.7

Fig. 16 is the most elaborate of all the toilet-trays. Unlike the foregoing examples, it is made of greenish-grey steatite (soapstone). Round its rim is a border of double arcading; in the centre, a drinking scene. At the top a man and woman are seated on a bench, the former clasping his companion with his left arm and holding a sceptre with his right, while she offers him a cup of wine. To the left of them is a draped woman, seated and playing on a lyre, and behind her a youth playing on the Pan-pipes. To the right, a standing male figure holding a staff in his left hand. In the middle register, to right, a large winevat, rising from acanthus leaves, in which two men, one on the back of the other, are treading grapes, while a lad in the centre draws off the juice in a tall flagon. To the left, another man is carrying a wineskin on his back and emptying its contents into a *krater*, while his companion on the left of the vase is raising a bowl to his lips. Below, in the bottom register, two figures are lying drunk. Framing the top of the scene from side to side is an undulating vine. The style is typical of Hellenistic art of the first century A.D., and the scene is reminiscent of the ‘Wedding of Ariadne and Dionysus’—a familiar subject to Graeco-Roman art. A feature of this tray that should be specially noticed is the figure of the woman seated beside her companion on the bench, with bared back and prominently developed buttocks. This particular type of female figure occurs in other reliefs of the Parthian period, but is not, so far as I know, found in later Gandhāra work (cf. figs. 17, 18 and 51).