Model Question and Answers for APSC | Gandhara sculpture owed as much to the Romans as to the Greeks. Explain.

Ans: Gandhara art is a style of Buddhist visual art that developed in what is now northwestern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan between the 1st century BCE and the 7th century CE. The style, of Greco-Roman origin, seems to have flourished largely during the Kushan dynasty and was contemporaneous with an important but dissimilar school of Kushan art at Mathura (Uttar Pradesh, India).

Roman origin elements in the Gandhara art:

1. In its interpretation of Buddhist legends, the Gandhara school incorporated many motifs and techniques from classical Roman art, including vine scrolls, cherubs bearing garlands, tritons, and The basic iconography, however, remained Indian.
2. The Gandhara school drew upon the anthropomorphic traditions of Roman religion and represented the Buddha with a youthful Apollo-like face, dressed in garments resembling those seen on Roman imperial statues.

Greek origin elements in the Gandhara art:

1. It has a strong idealistic realism and sensuous description of Hellenistic art
2. The Buddha of the Gandhara school has wavy hair and a long nose set in an oval face. The drape of his garment recalls the togas of Hellenistic sculpture, the divine figure often acquires humanistic details such as jewellery and a moustache.
3. But it was not just the drape of a garment, a gesture or a cast of countenance that the Greeks left It was also something of a worldview.
4. Older forms of Indian art had not bothered with chronology. There, forms and figures crowd the frame, almost like lush, natural The sculptures of the Gandhara school, in contrast, inhabit sequential narratives. Greek telos, or the logic of events tending towards a goal, seems to have entered the coded, teeming landscapes of the East.
5. Figures from the Greek pantheon appear alongside statues of the Buddha, often flanked by Corinthian columns and mounted on friezes.