A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c10.s2.1

c10.s2.1

Just as the sculptures and paintings of the Catacombs and the writings of the early Christian Fathers prove that no trustworthy tradition concerning the person of Jesus survived in the Church, and that artists for several centuries felt themselves at liberty to give free scope to their fancy in delineating His image, even so, during the first two or three centuries of the Christian era, Buddhist sculptors had not arrived at any settled convention as to the correct way of representing the effigy of Gautama the Buddha, whose real appearance in the flesh had been utterly forgotten. A long course of experiment was needed before Buddhist orthodoxy, guided by the later sculptors of the Gandhāra school, settled down to the monotonous and insipid conventionality of the figures of Buddha now manufactured by the thousand, and adopted, with rare exceptions, in all Buddhist lands. Ultimately the conception of the Indian *yogī* ascetic as worked out in Gandhāra became dominant, and passed through Khotan to the Far East.