Forms, models and concepts: regionalism and globalism in Gandharan visual culture.

Interpretive models based on diffusionistic views originating from ‘hegemonic’ cultures are often inadequate and inappropriate, especially for their not entailing the multi-centric approach the encounter between different cultures would logically require. This is the case with the ‘Hellenistic’ features of Gandharan art. After more than one hundred years of studies, the interpretation of Gandharan art still depends on Western paradigms which lack the necessary mediation with the context. This is mainly due to a marked imbalance between Western and Oriental disciplines, the former being supported by a highly standardised methodology and terminology based on strong clusters of cross-referenced data, the latter still suffering from serious gaps in the historical and archaeological records, poor in thesauri and repertories, in a word, still on the way to work out its own identity. On the other hand, the richness and internal coherence of the classical studies have created a kind of centripetal, and somehow static, reference point for interpreting any context where artistic forms of Western origin are tracked down, thus excessively characterising uncharted territories of cultural diversity, while at the same time the most challenging issue, i.e. the dynamics, interaction and outcomes of the encounter between diverse cultural universes, remains underrated or even missed. In fact, the so called ‘Hellenism’ of Gandharan art is a far more complex issue than the Western origin of forms and concepts. What we call ‘Gandharan Hellenism’ was rather a living culture which experienced circular phenomena of changes and osmosis over centuries. Hellenism cannot be considered a simple question of fashion or ‘influence’ but rather a conscious adoption of models that, though maintaining some semantic tie with the original sources, were transformed and integrated in other, coherent artistic syntaxes, where they acquire new and specific meanings. Based on archaeological evidence, the article highlights some exemplary cases of little-known or misinterpreted religious architectures and iconographies, making new hypotheses about their contextual meaning.