A GREY SCHIST HEAD OF A BODHISATTVA ANCIENT REGION OF GANDHARA, 3RD/4TH CENTURY

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A GANDHARAN GREY SCHIST HEAD OF A BODHISATTVA, ANCIENT REGION OF GANDHARA, 3RD/4TH CENTURY A.D. Carved from grey schist, the head is modelled at slightly under life-size with the face turned directly forward and the gaze lowered in meditative absorption. The features are full and regular, with heavy-lidded almond eyes beneath softly arched brows, a straight aquiline nose, and a small mouth set above a rounded chin. A neatly trimmed moustache curls upward at its tips, and a raised circular urna is set between the brows. The earlobes are elongated and pierced, retaining traces of the heavy ornaments that once distended them. The hair is drawn up from the forehead in wavy locks and gathered into an elaborate turban arrangement, surmounted by a sculpted ornament rising above the brow. Surface wear, encrustation and minor losses are visible at the turban, the tip of the nose, and along the lower break where the head was once joined to a now-missing body. The turban is the principal index of identity. Across the brow runs a jewelled diadem, behind which the cloth is gathered into broad striated folds, bound at the proper right side by a large rosette clasp and rising at the front into a fan-shaped crest formed of stacked, ribbed loops. This headdress, combined with the moustache, jewelled ornament and princely bearing, identifies the figure as a bodhisattva rather than a Buddha. In the Gandharan repertoire such crowned and bejewelled heads are most often associated with Siddhartha prior to his renunciation, or with Maitreya, the bodhisattva of the future. The downcast eyes and serene expression locate the figure within the meditative mode of representation, the princely ornament conveying his unrenounced worldly status while the inward gaze signals his spiritual attainment. Grey schist was the preferred medium of the Gandharan workshops active across the region corresponding to present-day northwestern Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan, where the stone was quarried locally and worked in quantity for the monastic complexes of Taxila, Swat, the Peshawar basin and Hadda. The choice of material is inseparable from the visual character of the school: the fine, dark, slightly micaceous stone allowed for the crisp undercutting and modulated planes by which Gandharan sculptors translated Hellenistic and Roman sculptural conventions into a Buddhist iconographic programme. The naturalistic treatment of the moustache and the classicising structure of the brow and nose here are characteristic of this synthesis, in which Mediterranean physiognomic models were placed in the service of a wholly Indic religious subject. By the 3rd and 4th centuries the Gandharan workshops were producing crowned bodhisattvas of increasing elaboration, with turbans and jewellery rendered in deeper relief and greater detail than in earlier phases. The present head, with its complex turban construction, jewelled diadem and softly modelled face, belongs to this mature stage of production, when the schools of the region were supplying the great monastic foundations of the northwest with images of the Buddha and his attendant bodhisattvas in considerable numbers. This head exemplifies the mature Gandharan treatment of the princely bodhisattva, in which Hellenistic naturalism in the modelling of the face is held in balance with the densely worked, distinctly Indic ornament of the turban. It is the survival of this turban, rather than the face alone, that allows the figure to be read as a bodhisattva, and the piece stands as a representative example of the crowned type around which much of the school's devotional sculpture was organised. Height: 21cm Height on Stand: 27cm

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