Maurya and Shunga Art c7.14

c7.14

It is somewhat curious that the lions in Mauryan art are always and invariably done in a manner that seems already to have been fixed by convention. Their formal pose and appearance, the rendering of their volume, bold and vigorous but stylised treatment, their plastic conception and the sense of form as revealed in them are on the whole the same and pre-determined. The trend of the style is already evident in the Basarh-Bakhira lion and it is within the limit of the given trend that the style evolves, and advances in treatment and execution. The aesthetic vision and imagination, the attitude and outlook of the artist do not show any definite change. This is partly true as well of the lion, the horse and the bull on the Sarnath abacus. It raises the presumption that this style and convention came from outside where they had been already fixed and well-established. The horse on the Sarnath abacus in its movement and modelling recalls the two horses in the relief on the Sacrophagus of the Amazons;⁴⁵ the vigorously striding lion and the bull both recall well-known Achaemenian prototypes of the same style and convention.⁴⁶ Even the elephant on the abacus has a distant kinship with the horned elephants on the early coins of the Seleucids, though the Sarnath elephant is much less conventional and shows somewhat a different sense of form and treatment.