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Sir John Marshall and Gandhāra Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Daniel Schlumberger
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Extract

As the Director of the Archaeological Survey of India for more than thirty years, at a time when new finds of Gandhāra art were constantly pouring in, as the excavator of Taxila, as an excavator in Gandhāra itself, Sir John Marshall has had a unique opportunity of building up first-hand knowledge of Gandhāra art. That his views on this great subject should be made known was most desirable, and the Department of Archaeology in Pakistan is to be thanked for having undertaken to publish this volume.

The illustration is abundant and, nearly all of it, excellent. It consists of 152 photographs, of sufficient size (in happy contrast with most of the pictures in Foucher’s Art grécobouddhique, and in some of Sir John Marshall’s own publications, Taxila included), carefully selected and arranged in order to exemplify the development of .‘the Early School’, as seen by Sir John. Many a piece is here properly reproduced for the first time. As a compendium of good pictures the volume will be most useful.

But the book is far more than just an album of well-chosen photographs, with commentary. As the subtitle says, it is a story. This story is told in twelve chapters. An introduction (Chapter 1) deals with the beginnings of Buddhism in India, and with the problem of how Buddhism fared under the Greek princes of the North-West during the second century B.C.… Among the myriads of Buddhist monuments that are preserved there is not one that can be referred with certainty to Greek authorship in that period (p. 4). Chapter 2 is about the Early Indian school of Art. Then come three chapters on the origins: Chapter 3, The Beginning of Gandhāra art: the Šaka period; Chapter 4, The Renaissance of Hellenistic art under the Parthians and its eflect on Gandhāra art; Chapter 5, Childhood of Gandhāra art. To Adolescence two chapters are devoted (Chapters 6 and 7), to Maturity four: Chapter 8 deals with the Period of Maturity in general; Chapter 9 with the Early Maturity period; the two following ones deal with the Later Maturity period, Chapter 10 with the reliefs, and Chapter 11 is about images and decorative carvings. Chapter 12 gives the conclusions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 35 , Issue 139 , September 1961 , pp. 176 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1961

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References

1 ANTIQUITY 1949, 17-18.

2 In his Taxila publication Sir John mentions objects of clay fired by accident (Taxila, II, 470, nos. 175, 176, 181) and others intentionally, not accidentally fired (ibid, nos. 173, 174). Having seen the Taxila finds on the spot, I rather feel inclined to consider all the fragments of architectural reliefs looking like terra-cotta to be clay fired by accident.

3 The great sanctuary, the main monument, is a Kanishka foundation. The secondary temple (temple B) is a later addition. The Buddhist platform in the plain is later too. See ANTIQUITY 1959, 81-86 (with bibliography).

4 All the niches around the courtyard of the main temple were adorned with great figures of clay, brightly painted, fragments of which have been saved (our PLATE XXI(a); other instances in Syria, XXXVII, 1960, 1-2, pl. VI, 4, and VIII, 2). The altar of the secondary temple had its front side decorated with birds in an architectural setting, all in clay, Journ. Asiat., CCXLII, 1954, p. 192, pl. IV, 1. The colossal statues on the Buddhist platform in the plain were of clay (our PLATE XXI(b); and Journ. Asiat., CCXLIII, 1955, p. 276, pl. III, 1).

5 Neither in the Kanishka buildings, nor in the later monuments (temple B on the acropolis; the Buddhist platform in the plain).

6 It should be noted that some of the ‘stucco figures’ mentioned by excavators may be clay, see for instance J. Hackin, L’oeuvre de la Délégation Archéologique Française en Afghanistan, 1922-1933, Tokyo, 1933, fig. I, given as stuc; but the description by A. Godard (p. 6) shows it to have been clay. Obviously it is exactly the same technique as at Surkh Kotal.

7 A. Foucher, La vieille route de l’Inde de Bactres à Taxila, Mémoires DAFA I, 1942-47, 346.

8 This is my position, v. Syria, XXXVII, 1960, 136.

9 An assertion which some people would, no doubt, emphatically reject.