page_title: Greco-Buddhist art
section_title: Fantastic animals
hierarchical_section_title: Greco-Buddhist art / Characteristics of Greco-Buddhist art / Fantastic animals
caption_attribution_description: Gandhara relief, Victoria and Albert Museum. Personal photograph 2005.
context_page_description: Greco-Buddhist art is the artistic manifestation of Greco-Buddhism, a cultural syncretism between the Classical Greek culture and Buddhism. Greco-Buddhist art is characterized by the strong idealistic realism and sensuous description of Hellenistic art and the first representations of the Buddha in human form, which have helped define the artistic canon for Buddhist art throughout the Asian continent up to the present. It is also a strong example of cultural syncretism between eastern and western traditions.
  The origins of Greco-Buddhist art are to be found in the Hellenistic Greco-Bactrian kingdom, located in today’s Afghanistan, from which Hellenistic culture radiated into the Indian subcontinent with the establishment of the Indo-Greek kingdom. Under the Indo-Greeks and then the Kushans, the interaction of Greek and Buddhist culture flourished in the area of Gandhara, in today’s northern Pakistan, before spreading further into India, influencing the art of Mathura, and then the Hindu art of the Gupta empire, which was to extend to the rest of South-East Asia.
context_section_description: Various fantastic animal deities of Hellenic origin were used as decorative elements in Buddhist temples, often triangular friezes in staircases or in front of Buddhist altars. The origin of these motifs can be found in Greece in the 5th century BC, and later in the designs of Greco-Bactrian perfume trays as those discovered in Sirkap. Among the most popular fantastic animals are tritons, ichthyo-centaurs and ketos sea-monsters. Similar fantastic animals are found in ancient Egyptian reliefs, and might therefore have been passed on to Bactria and India independently.
  As fantastic animals of the sea, they were, in early Buddhism, supposed to safely bring the souls of dead people to Paradise beyond the waters. These motifs were later adopted in Indian art, where they influenced the depiction of the Indian monster makara, Varuna's mount.
caption: An Ichthyo-Centaur, 2nd century Gandhara, Victoria and Albert Museum.
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