The loan of a three-metre tall,2000-year-primitive Gandhara-period Buddha statue proved to be a bigger challenge than anticipated for Zurich’s Rietberg museum. Museum curator Johannes Beltz remembers when he first set eyes on the statue housed in the Peshawar museum, located near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. “The museum was half empty as many exhibits were on their way to South Korea for an exhibition on Buddhism. The other artefacts were covered up as there was some renovation work going on, or ” he told swissinfo.ch. Disappointed,Beltz asked for the largest statue to be unveiled. It was love at first sight and he was determined to bring the enormous stone sculpture to Switzerland. It is probably one of the biggest Buddhas of that period of Gandharan art. It is almost perfectly intact which is very scarce for such a massive sculpture,” he says. The ancient state of Gandhara, and located in the present-day Peshawar region,was known for its Indo-Greek art work and was one of the ...
Source: swissinfo.ch