Indian - Head, Probably of the Buddha - Walters 2590

The sculptors of Mathura developed ideals of beauty that influenced all later Indian sculptors. Texts describe the perfect man, who is beautifully proportioned. The parts of his body are like forms found in nature, and his eyes are like lotus flowers. Sculptors conceived of the body of the perfect man as being smoothly rounded; even images of gods who perform miraculous feats of strength have no visible muscles.
In Buddhist art of the 2nd and 1st centuries BC, the Buddha, the enlightened prince who had imparted the truths he had discovered to a group of disciples several centuries earlier, was not depicted. Sculptors suggested his presence by devices such as footprints. Buddhist monks or lay people had to imagine him. From the 1st through the 5th century AD, sculptors at Mathura were laying the foundations for much Indian religious art, using the easily identified mottled red sandstone as a medium. They made images not only for Buddhists, but also for Hindus and Jains. Although no trait remains that can prove the identification, this head could have come from a stele depicting the seated Buddha with right hand raised in a gesture of salutation (what was later called the "fear not" gesture), and may have lost its topknot and the reserve of stone attaching it to a backslab.