Human history / by G. Elliot Smith.

  • Grafton Elliot Smith
Date:
1934
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Human history / by G. Elliot Smith. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    capitai since used in India - excluding the Greek capitals used at Gandhara - and is found all over India, among the Gandhara monasteries as elsewhere. The principal sculptures of the period are reliefs, mostly executed on the railings and ‘toranas’ (or gates) which surrounded the Buddhist stupas. These railings and gates were evidently no more than stone copies of wooden structures. Could we dis¬ cover what the wood-carving was like, we should be more certain of the history of early Indian art. As it is, we can only judge from the surviving stone reliefs. ‘Although it certainly appears to be true/ according to Mr. Vincent Smith (The Early History of India), ‘that Indian plastic and pictorial art, such as it was, drew its inspiration from Hellen¬ istic Alexandrian models during the Maurya Period, the Greek influence merely touched the fringe of Hindu civilization, . . . and when Indians have condescended, as in the case of relief sculpture and the drama, to borrow ideas from European teachers, the thing borrowed has been so cleverly disguised in native trappings that the originality of the Indian imitators is stoutly maintained even by acute and learned critics. ‘Although the details of real life in the sculptures of the early period are invariably purely Indian, the compositions as a whole, and the representations of mythical monsters, are certainly Hellen¬ istic, and exhibit the distinctive characteristics of Hellenistic art. The practice of decorating buildings with “pictures in relief’’ might well have been borrowed from Persia; but the composition and style of the Indian work are so remote from the Persian, and so akin to the Alexandrian, that it is impossible to doubt that the Indian artists imitated European [? Alexandrian] rather than Iranian models. . . . The drawing and execution of the Indian “pictures in relief” are of course much inferior to the Greek, but the general principles of the composition in both are identical/ Concerning the sculptures at Barhut (or Bharhut), Mr. Vincent Smith once more emphasized the importance of the evidence of the garland, previously mentioned: ‘The series of reliefs on the coping manifests the Alexandrian influence with special distinctness, the long garland being very