Page:History of Indian and Eastern Architecture Vol 1.djvu/67

INTRODUCTION. 37 For an honest purpose-like pre-Raphaelite kind of art, there is probably nothing much better to be found elsewhere. The art had apparently begun to decline when the gateways at Sanchi were executed somewhat later ; but whether this was not mainly due to the more refractory character of the stone, and a different school of workmen, it is hard to say. They may then have gained a little in breadth of treatment, but it had lost in delicacy and precision. Its downward progress was, how- ever, arrested, apparently by the rise, in the extreme north-west of India, of a school of sculpture strongly impregnated with the traditions of classical art. The Graeco-Baktrians, driven out by the Yue-chi, continued to hold some sort of domination in Afghanistan till not very long before our era, and a vast inter- change of ideas was, at that period, carried on between the east and west by means of newly - opened highways. Thus Greek models and art became familiar, and when once a demand arose for such workmanship, a school of art would appear. For the present it is sufficient to know that a quasi-classical school of sculpture did exist in the Panjab, and to the west of the Indus during the first four centuries after Christ, and it can hardly have flourished there so long, without its presence being felt in India. 1 Its effects were certainly apparent at Amaravati in the 1st and 2nd centuries, where a school of sculpture was developed, partaking of the characteristics of both those of Central India and of the west. Though it may, in some respects, be inferior to either of the parent styles, the degree of perfection reached by the art of sculpture at Amaravati may probably be considered as the culminating point attained by that art in India. When we meet it again in the early Hindu temples, and later Buddhist caves, it has lost much of its higher aesthetic and phonetic qualities, and frequently resorts to such expedients as giving dignity to the principal personages by making them double the size of less important characters, and of distinguish- ing gods from men by giving them more heads and arms than mortal man can use or understand. All this is developed, it must be confessed, with considerable vigour and richness of effect in the temples of Orissa and of Mysore, down to the I3th or I4th century. After that, in the north it was checked by the presence of the Moslims ; but, in the south, some of the most remarkable groups and statues and they are very remarkable were executed after this time, 1 For some account of Buddhist art in Gandhara and of early Indian sculpture, see Grunwedel's ' Buddhist Art in India,' Eng. translation (Quaritch, 1901). A work on 'Indian Sculpture and Painting,' by Mr E. B. Havell, has recently been published by Mr Murray.