National Museum Delhi, Rajpath crossing, New Delhi, India.
Sculptors of Gandhara.
An interesting fact regarding the representation of Gautama Siddhartha in art and stone is that no sculpture or painting to come out of ancient times truly does justice to what the great sage may indeed have looked like as a human being for the simple reason that for many years after his death, the wise saint was represented with signs and symbols that alluded to his birthmarks alone, and when the time had finally come to cast his image with the chisel and the brush, no living begin could recall what he actually looked like other than forming educated guesses out of a scanty set of clues ingrained in old Buddhist scriptures – which in the first place was never enough to put together the real face of the Buddha.
This striking point, no matter how significant it may seem to modern-day forensic archaeologists and historians, however, never posed much of an inconvenience for artists and sculptors of the ancient world. Who when tasked with portraying the Buddha in human form, time and again embraced their artistic liberty to represent him with the facial characteristics of the people they saw around them every day, and in the process lend the great sage vastly different appearances – in spite of sometimes actually producing him with what one can hopefully assume to really be his abnormally long ears and a lump that existed on the top of his head.
Though this artistic liberty clearly comes to the fore best, in the works of the ancient Tibetan artisans, who in truth can be said to be responsible for the Buddha’s popular present-day oriental features. Created as a part of a grand scheme to revive and promote the faith in its sanctuary of Tibet – after the religion had nearly been obliterated in the land of its birth, throttled by its parent religion of Hinduism during one of her most intense phases of revival and later Islam.
The trend of casting the Buddha in human form was not an invention of the Tibetans at all but of the more ancient people of Gandhara. A rugged region of Afghanistan which in historic times was a much-contested land, conquered and settled in turns by the Indo-European tribes known as the Aryans, then later by the Greeks, the Mauryans, the Parthians and finally the Kushans – a nomadic clan of horse archers who were instrumental in promoting and setting in precedence much of the art forms for later centuries through extensive patronage. Which not surprisingly resulted in the emergence of several innovations in the field of art such as the standing sculpture of the Buddha in the photo.
Created in the vicinity of the 2nd century A.D. In a period the Kushans reigned supreme from their twin capitals of Mathura in Uttar Pradesh India and Taxila in Pakistan, the statue is unique for not only being among the first to represent the Buddha in human form but also for its chiselled Greek appearance.
Gandharan Buddha Greetings Cards by Farbound.Net.
Actual Dimensions: 1200 x 1203pixels
A testament of not just how the Gandharan artisans started the fashion of creating the Buddha in styles they were most comfortable and skilled with but also of a east and west cultural fusion that may possibly have existed in the region since the time of Alexander’s invasion, cultivated by the Seleucids, and continued on under the banners of the culturally different empires of the Mauryans, the Parthians and the Kushans– with not one seeing a need to suppress or change the art with more native forms.
The sculpture belongs to the Greco-Buddhist art genre which developed and flourished for nearly a thousand years in Central Asia. Identified by its unusual mix of classical Greek craftsmanship and Buddhist ideologies.
