- 3107
A SILVER, COPPER AND HARDSTONE-INLAID BRONZE FIGURE OF A BUDDHIST HIERARCH TIBET, 13TH – 14TH CENTURY
Description
- Bronze with silver, copper and semi-precious stone inlay
- 16.3 cm, 6 3/8 in.
Himalayan Art Resources item no. 68485
Exhibited
The Sculptural Heritage of Tibet: Buddhist Art in the Nyingjei Lam Collection, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, October-December 1999.
Arte Buddhista Tibetana: Dei e Demoni dell' Himalaya, Palazzo Bricherasio, Turin, June-September 2004.
Rubin Museum of Art, New York, 2005-2017, on loan.
Stable as a Mountain: Gurus in Himalayan Art, Rubin Museum of Art, New York, 2009.
Casting the Divine: Sculptures of the Nyingjei Lam Collection, Rubin Museum of Art, New York, 2012-2013.
Literature
Casting the Divine: Sculptures of the Nyingjei Lam Collection, Rubin Museum of Art, New York, 2012-2013, cat. no. 67.
Catalogue Note
For another example of an ovoid lotus pedestal atop a stepped throne, further inlaid with semi-precious stones and adorned with addorsed lions, compare the current work with a thirteenth century sculpture depicting a Buddhist hierarch in the Cleveland Museum collection, see Jane Casey Singer, et al., The Sculptural Heritage of Tibet: Buddhist Art in the Nyingjei Lam Collection, London, 1999, p. 35, fig. 51. The presence of semi-precious stone inlay in both the present work and the Cleveland hierarch demonstrate the use of stone inlay in early Tibetan bronzes
Compare also the throne architecture to additional thirteenth/fourteenth century Tibetan bronze figures depicting Vajrasattva and Chanda Vajrapani from the Nyingjei Lam Collection, ibid., p. 60, fig. 24 and p. 98, pl. 16; as well as a fourteenth century figure of a Pagdru Kagyu lama, see Donald Dinwiddie, ed., Portraits of the Masters: Bronze Sculptures of the Tibetan Buddhist Lineages, Chicago, 2003, p. 186, cat. no. 42.