Early Gandharan Art and the Construction of a Collective Buddhist Identity

Anna Filigenzi (University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’)

Abstract

‘Art of Gandhāra’ is the conventional name given to a vast and influential phenomenon of Buddhist art which flourished from the early first to the mid-third century CE across geographically and culturally related regions of modern-day north-western Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan. In its broadest, widely accepted sense, the ‘art of Gandhāra’ is a complex cultural phenomenon that, in spite of the shared vocabulary of figurative patterns, technical solutions and architectural settings, subsumes a number of distinct regional variants and diachronic changes. However, studies mainly focused on the best known – and most striking to our eyes – among its distinctive traits, that is, the range of stylistic and iconographic elements of Western origin, often at the expenses of a structurally holistic hermeneutics. The local components of Gandharan art, as well as the underlying process, aims and means of such a tremendous creative endeavour, remain largely absent from the scientific debate. Based on the archaeological data collected in Swat by the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan, this lecture will explore the earliest stages of the art of Gandhara, observing them from the viewpoint of their innovative communication strategies, capable of mobilising great economic and intellectual resources and aimed at building around Buddhism a collective ideological cohesion.

Bio

Anna Filigenzi is a Lecturer at the University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’. She has been a member of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan since 1984 and the director of the Italian Archaeological Mission in Afghanistan since 2003. She has published extensively in Indian and Central Asian archaeology and art history, the disciplines which also represent the subjects of her teaching activities.