Bhaishajyaguru en bronze doré Chine, dynastie Yuan ou début de la dynastie Ming, XIVE siècle, marque Yongle

le bouddha de la médecine très finement sculpté et doré au mercure, habillé d'une robe ajustée avec une bordure ciselée de fleurs en rinceaux, le vêtement élégamment drapé sur son épaule gauche pour retomber en un éventail plissé devant lui, un cartouche incisé d'une visvavajra sur une extrémité de la bordure de la robe au dos, assis en vajraparyankasana sur une base lotiforme, la main gauche en dhyana mudra de la méditation et la main droite présentant le fruit de guérison

Some wear to the gilding including to the spine of the nose, eyebrow and chin (visible on the illustration), a few dents (tiny dent 5 mm to the lobe of the left ear, to some of the beads at the bottom of the lotus base, to the front of his left fore leg, 3mm to the left elbow), some pitted areas (3 mm to his left knee, 4 mm on the fore leg, 5 mm on his stomach), scratches (chest, left fore leg, inside the right arm, exterior of the left arm), a crack 1 cm to the hem of his left sleeve, but overall in good condition. The base is unsealed.
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Although signed with a Yongle six-character dedicatory mark this rare bronze figure of the Medicine Buddha dates to the Yuan dynasty or at the latest to the very early Ming dynasty. The sculptural style is related to the small remaining number of works that can be linked with Yuan patronage of the Nepalese master sculptors who were favored by the court. The close fitting robe predates the common early Ming fashion of a more flowing robe style where the cloth is naturalistically drawn taught over extremities and fits loosely elsewhere, falling in folds across the body and legs. The restrained and formal robe style of the Bhaishajyaguru is typical of pre-fifteenth century Nepalese style works. The Cleveland Museum's Yuan dynasty dry lacquer bodhisattva is an exemplar of this Sino-Nepalese style, see Heather Karmay, Early Sino-Tibetan Art, Warminster, 1975, p. 22, pl. 11, and displays the simplest of close fitting garments. Furthermore the face is square, robust and somewhat severe, like the Bhaishajyaguru, and in both sculptures the posture is set in rigid restraint. This contrasts markedly with the flowing style of the Yongle period bronzes. A gilt bronze bodhisattva in the Palace Museum, Beijing, dated by inscription to 1305, is similarly robed in a simple close fitting garment with an engraved textile pattern, see Sheila C. Bills, Sino-Tibetan Sculpture: The Tibetan Legacy, in Pratapaditya Pal, ed, On the Path to Void: Buddhist Art of the Tibetan Realm, Mumbai, 1996, p. 144, pl. 2. If the figure is indeed earlier than the mark the intriguing question remains as to when the mark was applied. The mark seems on close physical inspection to have a considerable build-up of accretion, wear to the surrounding gilding and evidence of corrosion up to much the same level as the rest of the bronze, perhaps indicating that it was done as early as the reign itself. But this is not at all sure, and there is ample evidence elsewhere of honorific marks being used later than the reign periods themselves; although in these cases the marks are mostly applied to objects at their time of manufacture, rather than adding them to objects of earlier date. Another example of a Yuan period Sino-Nepalese gilt bronze with a Yongle reign mark was previously in the collection of the New England Regional Art Gallery, New South Wales, see Sotheby's, Melbourne, 31 Oct, 2007, lot 549.

David Weldon