Page:A Handbook of Indian Art.djvu/70

36 movement and vivid style of narrative, intense religious feeling, joined with a wonderful instinct for decorative design, much affinity with Sānchī art and the art of Borobūdūr. Here also one can trace some of the roots of the school of Ajantā painting. The treatment of the lotus, the favourite flower of the Indian artist, is precisely similar to that found at Ajantā, making allowances for the different technique of the sculptor and painter (Pl. VII).

And since so much attention has been given by orientalists to the influence of the Hellenistic school of Gandhāra upon Indian figure sculpture, it is important to observe that in the Sānchī school, which certainly owed nothing to Gandhāra, there are a few figures in the round executed with as much understanding of the human form as the best of the Græco-Buddhist sculptures. The robust young damsel with arms and legs overweighted with ornaments who appears on the Sānchī gateways as a wood-nymph hanging on to the boughs of a mango-tree may seem less graceful and refined than the Dryad of pure Greek art, though the primeval forest might know this rustic beauty better than the elegant town-bred maid of Athens.

But few artists would assert that the sculptor who created this vigorously drawn and admirably modelled figure had anything to learn from the academic technique of the Gandhāra school. Dr. Vincent Smith, in order to prove foreign influences in Hindu art, illustrates an example of decadent Hellenistic sculpture of the so-called Copto-Alexandrian school, and suggests that the motive may have found its way into Indian art by the transference of Alexandrian ideas. No one can say when or where the idea originated—it might have been in the Garden of Eden. But it is