The antiquities of Central Asia include frescoes executed on the walls of caves and buildings, and paintings on silk paper.[477] The origin and affinities of this art are still the subject of investigation and any discussion of them would lead me too far from my immediate subject.  But a few statements can be made with some confidence.  The influence of Gandhara is plain in architecture, sculpture, and painting.  The oldest works may be described as simply Gandharan but this early style is followed by another which shows a development both in technique and in mythology.  It doubtless represents Indian Buddhist art as modified by local painters and sculptors.  Thus in the Turfan frescoes the drapery and composition are Indian but the faces are eastern asiatic.  Sometimes however they represent a race with red hair and blue eyes.

On the whole the paintings testify to the invasion of Far Eastern art by the ideas and designs of Indian Buddhism rather than to an equal combination of Indian and Chinese influence but in some forms of decoration, particularly that employed in the Khan’s palace at Idiqutshahri,[478] Chinese style is predominant.  It may be too that the early pre-buddhist styles of painting in China and Central Asia were similar.  In the seventh century a Khotan artist called Wei-ch’ih Po-chih-na migrated to China, where both he and his son Wei-ch’ih I-seng acquired considerable fame.

Persian influence also is manifest in many paintings.  A striking instance may be seen in two plates published by Stein[479] apparently representing the same Boddhisattva.  In one he is of the familiar Indian type:  the other seems at first sight a miniature of some Persian prince, black-bearded and high-booted, but the figure has four arms.  As might be expected, it is the Manichaean paintings which are least Indian in character.  They represent a “lost late antique school"[480] which often recalls Byzantine art and was perhaps the parent of mediaeval Persian miniature painting.

The paintings of Central Asia resemble its manuscripts.  It is impossible to look through any collection of them without feeling that currents of art and civilization flowing from neighbouring and even from distant lands have met and mingled in this basin.  As the reader turns over the albums of Stein, Grunwedel or Le Coq he is haunted by strange reminiscences and resemblances, and wonders if they are merely coincidences or whether the pedigrees of these pictured gods and men really stretch across time and space to far off origins.  Here are coins and seals of Hellenic design, nude athletes that might adorn a Greek vase, figures that recall Egypt, Byzantium or the Bayeux tapestry, with others that might pass for Christian ecclesiastics; Chinese sages, Krishna dancing to the sound of his flute, frescoes that might be copied from Ajanta, winged youths to be styled cupids or cherubs according to our mood.[481]

Stein mentions[482] that he discovered a Buddhist monastery in the terminal marshes of the Helmund in the Persian province of Seistan, containing paintings of a Hellenistic type which show “for the first time in situ the Iranian link of the chain which connects the Graeco-Buddhist art of extreme north-west India with the Buddhist art of Central Asia and the Far East.”