2. The Art of Gandhara on the Northwest Frontier of India

During the last Arsacid centuries and the first Sassanian ones, the most distant countries of the East, which were reached by the troops of Alexander the Great, also experienced something like the late flowering of Hellenistic art. In the Greco-Bactrian kingdom to which the Pyatirechye (Punjab) belonged on the northwestern border of India, there existed a mixed, semi-Iranian-semi-Greek culture, which did not disappear completely under the Indosciphs, the successors of the Bactrian owners of these countries, as a result of which the art of Pyatirechye was mixed in the same sense as Gallo-Roman and German-Roman provincial art or as the art of Arsakids and Sassanids. The Indian frieze with sea elephants (Fig. 553) is very similar to the German frieze with sea goats (see Fig. 541, and). The study of this peculiar Greco-Indian art was published by Ernst Curtius as early as 1875. Vincent Smith, who was strictly isolated the Punjab’s Hellenistic-Indian art, expressed the most important and true opinions about this art in 1889. The question of Greek influence, expressed in some of the major works of the early Buddhist art of inner India, with which we will soon become familiar, remains controversial. But in Mathur (approximately 50 kilometers from Agra), sculptural works have been found that are of undoubtedly Greek character and which should be considered the creatures of the campaigns of Alexander the Great. It is especially curious that, just as in the mixed Glorim art we found the late relief depicting Hercules in the fight against the lion (see fig. 541, m), and in the Greek itself from the Greek-Indian works discovered in Mathur, also relief we also see Hercules killing the lion. This relief is stored in the Calcutta Museum. It is difficult to assume that he was sculptured before 200 AD. er according to the time of its origin, it must be fairly close to the above-mentioned relief on the Gunestrup vase. In it, the forms are weak and vague, but not as angular as in this northern relief; however, in both reliefs the main motive is the same, Greek.

Fig. 553. Indian frieze with images of elephant seals. According to Curtius

Fig. 554. Statue of Athena. According to Smith

In Gandhara art, we meet with real Roman-Indian sculpture. The Gandharians constituted the main nucleus, the population of the Bactrian state, from the Greek kings of which Menander had turned to Buddhism even a hundred and fifty years before Christ. Indo-Scythian rulers of Gandhara also worshiped Buddha. The ruins of their monasteries - the place of discovery of works of Gandhar art, according to Grünwedel, flourished as early as the 4th century. n e.

Among the monuments of Greek-Bactrian art also belongs the statue of Athena in the Lahore Museum (fig. 554); she obviously represents Athena with a helmet on her head, and only the insufficient sharpness of the forms gives her a slightly Indian character. But actually Gandhara art reproduces Buddhist images and myths in the forms of Roman art of the times of the decline of the empire. Reliefs, which, according to Vincent Smith, belong to the years 200-350. n e., its overcrowded figures resemble reliefs of Roman sarcophagi; on the statues, the folds of the draperies clearly respond with somewhat spoiled classical traditions. The type of Buddha, depicted standing or sitting with legs tucked under itself, sometimes has a distant resemblance to the type of Apollo. One can study Gandhara sculpture based on its works, which are kept in the British and Berlin museums, mainly in the Lahore and Calcutta collections. We will speak about its meaning for Indian art in another place, and now we will restrict ourselves to a brief indication of the Hellenistic-Roman elements inherent in it.

In the Lahore Museum is a famous statue of a mustache "king", depicted in a sitting position. Her head produces the same impression as the heads of the Dacians in their Roman images.

Her stomach is swollen, as in Indian figures. The figures surrounding her, in their postures and clothes, are quite close to the Roman ones. The best preserved reliefs of narrative content, namely depicting Buddhist legends, came from the monastery in Jamalgari to the British Museum. When you first look at them, you might think that these are real Greco-Roman works. How the artistic motifs of the Greek “battle with the giants” adapted to this or that Buddhist myth can be judged from the fragment of the triangular relief located in the Calcutta Museum. The body shapes of the figures represented on it, the play of their muscles, like the main motifs, resemble Hellenistic-Roman art. The other group, preserved in many parts, constitutes an obvious imitation of the abduction of Ganymede by the work of Leochares (see vol. 1, book 3, II, 2), only in it we find, instead of a slim youth, a female figure with a big belly. The relief of the Lahore Museum (Fig. 555), depicting the host of the demons of Mary, the evil spirit, makes its overall appearance more likely to be a barbarian-Roman than an Indian sculpture.

So, we see that the successors of Hellenistic-Roman art have spread to all countries of the ancient world. Everywhere between them make their way, and, moreover, in the same direction, the shoots alien to this art, which are woven with them and cover them; in the new art arising from here, as in a fabric consisting of a warp and a weft, gold threads are almost everywhere seen, borrowed from the dead world of classical antiquity.