Maurya and Shunga Art c7.15

c7.15

The aesthetic vision and imagination and the conventional style and fixed expression just spoken of are most evident in the crowning lions. Compared with later figural sculptures in the round, of Yakshas and their female counterparts or the reliefs of Barhut; Sanchi and Bodhgaya, the art represented by the crowning lions belongs to an altogether different world of conception and execution, of style and technique, altogether much more complex, urban and civilised. They have nothing archaic or primitive about them, and the presumption is irresistible that the impetus and inspiration of this art must have come from outside. Did it come from the Achaemenian West? This seems to be very doubtful, for the modelling of these sculptures have nothing in common with Medo-Achaemenian sculptures, nor the powerful feeling for volume and preference for stagnant compact forms have anything in common with Medo-Achaemenian Iran. Moreover West-Asiatic art, especially Iranian art during the Achaemenian period came heavily under the influence of Hellenistic art; further, "the few attempts made in Iran in the domain of free plastic art bear an entirely different stamp in their preference for angular forms."⁴⁷ Marshall therefore argued for Hellenistic plastic tradition as practised by Graeco-Bactrian artists. From what we know of the Hellenistic colonies in West-Asia and the part they played in Mauryan India, it is possible, nay highly probable, that Hellenistic art and culture played also a very dominant role in Mauryan art. The Mauryan lions, indeed, in their aesthetic conception and plastic vision, in their conventional modelling and advanced visualisation, in their feeling for volume and sense of form invariably recall conventional and decadent colonial Greek works of the same art-form and design. Here then we can trace the source of the impetus and inspiration of the conventional art of the crowning lions of Mauryan columns. Here then, in a tradition familiar with lions and bulls and horses was the convention fixed and determined.