This is the best summary I could come up with:

After spending 49 days under a bodhi tree (a kind of fig), Siddhartha attained enlightenment and came to be known as the Buddha Shakyamuni, meaning “the wise-one of the Shakya [clan].”

They showed a riderless horse (to signify Siddhartha’s departure from his father’s palace at the beginning of his spiritual quest), an empty throne beneath a tree (to denote his awakening), a kneeling deer (to evoke the forest where he delivered his first sermon) and a wheel (his dharma, or teachings).

He reminded me of Valerio Cigoli’s beloved Renaissance sculpture of the naked Morgante, a dwarf in the court of Cosimo I, sitting astride a giant turtle in Florence’s Boboli Gardens.

As the Met’s Kurt Behrendt points out in his 2019 book, “How to Read Buddhist Art,” “the veneration of these goddesses would have been vitally important to the lay community, who were probably more concerned with the success of their crops than with something as elusive as enlightenment.”

A winged lion on top of a pillar reminds us that early Buddhist art also incorporated motifs from other cultures, especially Persia, Greece and Rome.

Some of the earthy complexity and messiness of early Buddhist iconography is brushed aside and purified as the serene figure of the Buddha himself becomes manifest and takes commanding shape.

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