A finely carved marble figure of a seated Bodhisattva, Tang dynasty | 唐 大理石菩薩座像殘件

Acquired in London, 1997.

購藏於倫敦，1997年

This sensual image of a Bodhisattva, so gracefully carved with deeply voluptuous movement, is a legacy of the high period of the Tang dynasty when China’s sculptural tradition reached its most mature phase. The modelling of the aristocratic male figure is articulated with vivid realism, the dignified poise of the Bodhisattva endowed with the uttermost spirituality. In contrast to the more sinicised treatment of the human form in the Northern Qi and Sui dynasties, sculptures of the high Tang exhibit a deep level of influence from the artistic style of the Indian Gupta Empire, itself embued with resonances of the Hellenistic tradition.

The sculpture would originally have been supported on a tiered pedestal, but the rare feature of atlantes alongside masks within pearl roundels is preserved well. Compare another figure of a Bodhisattva, still retaining its heads but with arms missing, similarly seated but with the body straight upright, wearing simpler jewellery and the decoration on the pedestal worn away, excavated in Qi county, Shanxi province and now in the Shanxi Provincial Museum, illustrated in Matsubara Saburo, Chugoku Bukkyo chokoku shiron [Historical survey of Chinese Buddhist sculpture], Tokyo, 1995, vol. 3, no. 691, where it is attributed to the first half of the 8th century; and a torso of a Heavenly King, seated with legs crossed on a pedestal simulating coarse rockwork, with the body similarly modelled and draped with elaborate scarves but wearing simpler jewellery, excavated from the site of the Da Anguo Temple outside Xi’an, illustrated ibid., no. 748. The decoration on the pedestal and the jewellery can be compared to the ornamentation on a slightly earlier bronze pedestal for a Buddha in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, dated in accordance with 593; see Matsubara, op.cit., vol. 2, no. 569.

The way such figures were placed inside a cave temple can be seen in illustrations of Tang cave no. 17 at Tianlongshan in Shanxi province, where the three Buddhas of the past, the present and the future, each adorning one of the cave walls, were each flanked by either seated or standing Bodhisattvas of a related type, see Osvald Siren, Chinese Sculpture: From the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century, London, 1925, pls 498-501.