The Cambridge History of India, Vol. I: Ancient India v1.c33.19

v1.c33.19

While the Sārnāth capital is thus an exotic, alien to Indian ideas in expression and in execution, the statue of Pārkham falls naturally into line with other products of indigenous art and affords a valuable starting point for the study of its evolution. These two works represent the alpha and the omega of early Indian art, between which all the sculptures known to us take their place, approximating to the one or the other extreme according as the Indian or Perso-Hellenic spirit prevailed in them. Thus, the two statues from Patna in the Calcutta Museum (Pl. XIII, 29, 30) are akin in many respects to the Pārkham image, but exhibit a nearer approach to plurifaciality in the moulding of the torso. The lion capital at Sānchī, on the other hand, though not quite as successful as that of Sārnāth, shows so close an affinity to it, that there can be little doubt that it was the handiwork of one and the same artist; and the well-developed modelling of the figures on the other columns of Açoka shows that, in spite of their occasionally inferior execution, they belong to the same Perso-Hellenistic group. It is not, of course, to be presumed that a single sculptor was responsible for all these monuments, nor yet that all the sculptors employed were of equal ability. Probably, there were many Indians assisting the foreign artists in the mechanical part of their work, and these, we may believe, were responsible for some of the sculptures noticed above, but it is incredible that any Indian hand at this period should either have modelled in clay or chiselled from the stone such perfected forms as those of the Sārnāth capital.