Naturalistic art – a style that strives to accurately depict the natural world – is recognized as having the ability to tap into human neurobiology like no other art style. Naturalistic art offers vicarious experiences, emotional journeys experienced in our imaginations through viewing life-like representations. These figurative scenarios, in turn, teach us valuable lessons about ourselves and the universe.
As Alexander created his empire, he established cities that blended Greco-Macedonian culture with that of the local population. Perhaps most illustratively, the city of Ai Khanoum exhibits the remnants of a tantalizing culture that melded local Bactrian, Persian, and Greek elements to form a strikingly unique culture. In Gandhara, after Alexander’s death and the eclipse of the Greco-Macedonian successor states by the Scythians, Parthians, and Kushans, the vestiges of this hybrid culture lingered. Evidence suggests that artists harnessed naturalism, an important element of Greek art, to spread the Buddha’s dhamma (‘teachings’).
Tradition and innovation
Non-Gandharan Indian art before the second century AD contained non-linear representations that are difficult to follow. For example, the representations of the Buddha’s former lives (the Jatakas) in the stupas (Buddhist shrines) of Bharhut (185–72 BC), Sanchi (300 BC – AD 60), and early Amaravati (200–100 BC) refrain from portraying the Buddha as a human, instead using an elephant, lotus flower, or a Bodhi tree, among other symbols.
This tradition originates from Vedic figurative art, which, a great being, as a , a human being, was a foreign concept in Indian tradition. Consequently, Indian coins from the second century BC symbolize the sun as a wheel, a lotus flower, or a ball that radiates rays.
