A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c10.s3.4

c10.s3.4

The general impression produced by study of the Gandhāra sculptures is that they form a class standing to a considerable extent apart from the main current of the evolution of art within the limits of India. M. Foucher has succeeded, I think, in demonstrating that the Gandhāra school has no direct filial relations with the earlier art of Maurya and Sunga times dealt with in Chapter III of this work, notwithstanding the appearance in both of certain elements common to the Hellenistic art of Western Asia. The artists of the north-west, who were masters of the technique of Asia Minor, had no need to copy tritons, centaurs, and so forth, from the works of their humbler predecessors in the interior. The true view seems to be that, whatever may be the sources and extent of foreign influence on the work of early Indian sculptors, the rapid development of the Gandhāra school during the first century of the Christian era was the direct result of a fresh importation into the frontier regions, by accomplished artists introduced from outside, of Hellenistic ideas expressed in the forms then current throughout the Roman Empire.