Head of the Buddha

Gandhara (Kushan period),
4th/5th century

Height: 8.4 cm
Width: 5.5 cm
Depth: 6.5 cm

A pale off-white stucco head of the Buddha, finely modelled and looking down, painted with traces of red pigment.

He has an oval face, with deep-set almond-shaped eyes, and looks down to the ground, as if deep in contemplation. He has a long, straight nose above full and rounded lips, with both attributes showing traces of original terracotta paint. His thick curling hair is tied to the top in an usnisha, forming a widow’s peak below. He also displays an urna mark painted in terracotta above the bridge of his nose, suggesting that he is the Buddha himself.

This fine head of the Buddha demonstrates the concern of the later Gandharan artists with the naturalistic modelling of features in realistic detail. In comparison, the stone sculptors of Mathura, the other major school of the Kushan dynasty, worked with soft mottled red sandstone, to produce a more abstracted but also more sensual and earthy style.

The Gandhara region covered a large part of modern day north-western Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. The sculpture of Gandhara is a cosmopolitan hybrid combining Hellenistic or Greco-Roman, Indian, Iranian and central Asian styles with mainly Buddhist iconography. By the end of the first century these aesthetic traditions had developed cohesively into a distinctive and recognisable style. Sculptures in stone, usually schist, are considered to predate those modelled more easily from malleable stucco and terracotta, although all these materials were used from an early date, so dates suggested for the sculptures of this period must be regarded as tentative.

For similar examples, see W. Zwalf, A Catalogue of the Gandhara Sculpture in the British Museum, Volume II, 1996, pp. 296-309.