disposal. Puzzled as I felt at the time about the interpretation of the frieze, there was something that exercised my attention even more. It was the difference, unmistakable and yet difficult to define, between the artistic treatment of the frieze composition above and that of the figures in the dado. In the latter almost everything, the general scheme, the ease of design, the technique of colouring with its light and shade, the freedom with which each figure was treated, pointed strongly to work by the hand of a painter who was mainly reproducing types fully developed by Western art, and yet was sufficiently familiar with its spirit and methods to give an individual air to each of his portraits. Looking at his work in the dado I had no need to ask myself what these panels and decorative features meant. The beauty and joy of life pervading almost all of them would suffice to please Western eyes.
In the frieze it was very different. The many points of resemblance in technique, etc., left no doubt about the same hand having been at work here. Yet, though many features, such as the drapery and the quadriga, were manifestly borrowed from classical art, there remained for me the impression that the painter was following models which had already passed through the far stiffer moulds of a distinctly Indian tradition. Where so much is still obscure, it may be premature to hazard explanations. But it seems to me likely that, whereas in the frieze the painter, wherever his original home may have been, was obliged by the sacred subject to cling closely to the conventional representation which Graeco-Buddhist art had centuries before adopted for that particular legend, he was left free by the decorative and quasi-secular character of the dado to yield to art influences from the West more direct and more recent. To put it quite briefly, the Graeco-Buddhist style of India gave its impress to the frieze, and the contemporary art of the Roman Orient as transmitted through Persia was reflected in the dado.
The puzzle as to the subject of the frieze was solved when in the summer of 1910 I was able to submit it to the expert judgment of my friend Professor A. Foucher, the leading authority on the Buddhist iconography of
IIIFカラー高解像度
