MICHAEL WOOD ON… THE GLORIES OF BUDDHIST ART
I’VE JUST RETURNED FROM A TRIP TO NEW YORK. While there, I took the opportunity to see a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: ‘Tree and Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India’. It’s about the origins of Buddhist art, and is one of the most fascinating – and moving – shows I have ever seen.
The core period covered by the exhibition is the first four centuries AD, some half a millennium after the Buddha’s lifetime, when regional artforms across Afghanistan and north India gave birth to the art we recognise today as Buddhist: for example, the Buddha represented wearing a Greek toga, and the richly illustrated mythical stories from his life in high relief sculpture adorning assembly halls, gateways and relic stupas (the great domed memorials containing the Buddha’s ashes).
The exhibition has taken eight years to plan, with pieces from India and also from US and UK collections; it has involved a huge logistical effort. Some exhibits take us back to discoveries made in the 19th century (marbles from the Indian village of Amaravati, for example, which were removed by the British in the 1840s.)
But the really eye-opening items come from excavations in the last 20 or 30 years, some of which have not even been seen yet in India. Especially remarkable are the architectural pieces from spectacular south Indian sites at Kanaganahalli in Karnataka (excavated in the 1990s) and Phanigiri in Telangana (excavated since 2003) – regions till now not known for great Buddhist art. Many fragments, reverently buried in sandy soil when the buildings were abandoned more than 1,500 years ago, are so wonderfully preserved that it is as if they were cut yesterday.
In its early life, Buddhism was largely limited to the northern Ganges plain. It first spread outside India in the third century BC under the great emperor Ashoka, who sent embassies westward to Syria and the Mediterranean and (so tradition has it) eastwards to China, where there is still an Ashoka temple in the port of Ningbo.
Buddhist representational forms really came to the fore from the first century AD, when two great artistic traditions emerged: the Gandhara style in what is now northwest Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the Mathura style in north India.
Following the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek cultural influences persisted in north-west India and Afghanistan for centuries. This is reflected in the
