Age of the Nandas and Mauryas c12.s17.15

c12.s17.15

It is somewhat curious that the lions in Mauryan art are always and invariably done in a manner that seems already to have been fixed by convention. Their formal pose and appearance, the rendering of their volume, bold and vigorous but stylised, their plastic conception in one word, and the sense of form as revealed in them are on the whole the same and already pre-determined. The trend of the style is already evident in the Basarh-Bakhira lion and it is within the limits of the given trend that the style evolves and advances in treatment and execution. The aesthetic vision and imagination and the attitude and outlook of the artist do not mark any definite change. This is partly true as well of the lion, the horse and the bull on the Sārnāth abacus. It raises the presumption that this style and convention came from outside where they were already fixed and well established. The horse on the Sārnāth abacus in its movement and modelling recalls the two horses in the relief on the Sarcophagus of the Amazons¹; the vigorously striding lion and the bull recall well-known Achaemenian prototypes of the same style and convention². Even the elephant on the abacus has a distant kinship with the horned elephants on the early coins of the Seleucids, though the Sārnāth elephant is much less conventional and shows somewhat a different sense of form and treatment.