A History of Fine Art in India and Ceylon, from the Earliest Times to the Present Day c17.7

c17.7

We are thus led to consider the second foreign element in the most ancient schools of Indian art, that is to say, the Greek element, expressed in Asiatic Hellenistic forms. In Asoka's age the chief schools of Greek sculpture were in Asia Minor at Pergamum, Ephesus, and other places, not in Greece, and the Hellenistic forms of Greek art had become largely modified by Asiatic and African traditions, reaching back to the ancient days of Assyria and Egypt. It is consequently difficult to disentangle the distinctively Greek element in early Indian art. The acanthus leaves, palmettos, centaurs, tritons, and the rest, all common factors in Hellenistic art, are as much Asiatic as Greek. The art of the Asokan monoliths is essentially foreign, with nothing Indian except details, and the fundamentally alien character of its style is proved by the feebleness of the Indian attempts to copy it. I think that the brilliant work typified by the Sārnāth capital may have been designed in its main lines by foreign artists acting under the orders of Asoka, while all the details were left to the taste of the Indian workmen, much in the same way as long afterwards the Kutb Mīnār was designed by a Muhammadan architect and built by Hindu masons, under the orders of the Sultan Iyaltimish.²