Head of Emaciated Siddhartha

We owe most of Buddhist iconography to the artists of historic Gandhara.
Between the 1st century B.C. and the 4th century A.D., in the northern region of the Kushan Empire, the first images of Prince Siddhartha Gautama as a bodhisattva and as an ascetic monk were created.
This iconographic revolution was linked to the rise of the Universal Vehicle (Mahayana Buddhism) and the associated need to provide icons for large communities of devotees to worship. Until this moment, the Master had been represented only in a conceptual, aniconic form—such as his footprints, an empty throne, or the wheel of Dharma. In fact, for the Hinayana Buddhist school, any representation of the Buddha as a human being was considered impossible due to his metaphysical nature after Enlightenment.
This early Buddhist iconography, strongly influenced by the Hellenistic sculptural canon, must be regarded as the true root of the later Buddhist art that developed in the northern part of the Indian Subcontinent and the Himalayan region.
The extraordinary creativity of Gandharan artists is evident in this Head of Siddhartha as an Ascetic, which was originally part of an independent sculpture depicting Siddhartha seated in meditation.
In this extremely rare iconography (the few known representations of an emaciated Siddhartha exist only in Gandharan art), the tragic and severe emaciation reflects his prolonged fasting and his attempt to attain Enlightenment through asceticism. It conveys his unwavering determination to transcend the illusion of the material world.
The anatomy of this head is only partially idealized, demonstrating a precise understanding of the physical effects of starvation—such as sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, protruding bones, and distended veins.
The Greek wave style of the hair suggests an early execution period, placing this sculpture in the very first years of the Common Era.