Aesthetic Refinement by Successive Incorporation of ‘Extraneous’ Features

Towards a Typological-Stylistic Sequence of Early Gandhāran Buddha Images in Stone, 1st–3rd Centuries

Abstract

An unusual, idiosyncratic head of the Buddha from the Swāt Valley, belonging to the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, forms the starting point of this preliminary enquiry into the typological and stylistic development of early Gandhāran Buddha images. While anthropomorphic depictions of the Buddha appear to have been rare during the first century CE, their number significantly increased during the reign of the Kushan ruler Kaniṣka I (c. 127–150 CE). It is plausible to assume that in Gandhāra, a distinctive and aesthetically appealing design of the Buddha image was striven for, which is suggested by the sculptural
material known to us. This corpus, comprising all the hitherto published objects as well as those made accessible on the webpages of museums worldwide, including both single-figure images and narrative panels, has been evaluated for the present essay. Through a careful comparative study of the morphological features, centring on the head portion, arguably the most essential constituent of the Buddha’s representation, the successive creation of innovative designs as well as their plausible chronological sequence are proposed here, with the latter, as far as possible, calibrated on the basis of images dated by inscriptions.