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A RARE PAINTING OF THE ARHAT PINDOLA BHARADVAJA TIBET, 16TH CENTURY
纽约
2021年09月22日 开拍 / 2021年09月20日 截止委托
拍品描述
A RARE PAINTING OF THE ARHAT PINDOLA BHARADVAJA
TIBET, 16TH CENTURY
31 x 19 in. (79.4 x 49.5 cm.)
Collection of Dr. Hans Werner Riedel and Dr. Ralf Dieter Loher-Riedel, Munich, before 2015. 拍品专文 The present painting, depicting the arhat, Pindola Bharadvaja, set within a verdant landscape and accompanied by an attendant figure, is part of a tradition of arhat painting sets with origins in both early Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism, and which achieved an extraordinary degree of syncretism between the two cultures in the early fifteenth century. Arhats (Chinese: luohan) were the original followers of the Buddha, or important monks who lived in the years following the Buddha’s death and helped to transmit his teachings, although there is little historical record for their actual existence (with the exception of Rahula, the Buddha’s son). Over time, it became canon for the arhats to be represented as a group of sixteen alongside the Buddha Shakyamuni, the attendant, Dharmatala, the patron, Hvashang, and the Four Guardian Kings. The concept of the sixteen arhats is believed to have entered Tibet with Atisha (982-1054 CE), and was known in China as early as the Tang dynasty, when the Buddhist monk and painter, Guanxiu (832-912 CE) painted a well-known set of arhat paintings. The Chinese and Tibetan representations of arhats remained stylistically, and to a lesser degree, iconographically distinct from one another until the early Ming dynasty, when the socio-political upheavals following the end of the Mongol Yuan dynasty brought the Tibetan and Ming Chinese realms ever closer together. Important Tibetan lamas and dignitaries began traveling to the early Ming capital of Nanjing, presenting gifts to the emperor, who in return lavished expensive luxury goods and works of art for presentation to monasteries in Tibet. Among these exchanges, sets of sixteen arhat paintings are recorded as gifts. In 1407, for instance, the Fifth Karmapa, Deshin Shegpa (1384-1415) arrived in Nanjing with a set of sixteen arhat paintings as a gift for the Yongle emperor (r. 1402-1424), and in 1418, Shakya Yeshe, a Gelugpa lama, returned from the capital with, among other gifts, a set of sixteen arhat kesi (woven textile) thangkas. These examples were but two of numerous gift exchanges between the Chinese emperors and Tibetan lamas in the early Ming dynasty, which fostered a particularly vibrant and syncretic style of Buddhist art. The style of arhat paintings that evolved in the Yongle period owes much to the secular tradition of landscape literati painting in China, and break from the contemporaneous Tibetan compositional practice of Buddhist paintings, in which deities and other important figures are set within a regimented and prescribed hierarchy. In the earliest-known Yongle arhat paintings (of the few remaining, most reside in private collections but an almost complete group can be viewed on Himalayan Art Resources, www.himalayanart.org, and a complete set of eighteenth-century paintings mirroring the Yongle-period examples reside in the National Palace Museum, Beijing), the main figures are set within lush landscapes, surrounded by craggy mountains, curving pine boughs, and flowing streams. In the tradition of Chinese literati paintings, nature and country life was seen as an escape from the intrigues of the court, a place where scholars could find the peace needed to write poetry, perform music, and develop ideas. It is no coincidence that the arhats of these early Yongle paintings, figures who represented wisdom and enlightenment, were placed within the tranquil confines of a natural landscape. In contrast to earlier Tibetan paintings, in which nearly all figures are depicted frontally, the arhats of these Yongle paintings are shown in various poses, some in three-quarter profiles. In appearance, the arhats are depicted either as youthful and idealized, with Chinese facial features, or as stereotypes of Indian figures, with dark skin and wizened visages. In most cases, the arhats are accompanied by diminutive attendant figures, who present tribute or hold iconographic identifying attributes; this hierarchy of size between the important figures and their attendant figures was also prevalent in earlier Chinese literati paintings. The present painting is undoubtedly directly derived from the early Yongle sets of arhat paintings. Although Pindola Bharadvaja was not represented among the well-known set of nine paintings, one of which was inscribed with a six-character Yongle mark, sold by Gìsele Cro?s in 2002, and illustrated in Splendor of Yongle Painting: Portraits of Nine Luohan, Brussels, 2002, the composition of the painting of Pindola Bharadvaja in the eighteenth-century set in the National Palace Museum, Beijing (Himalayan Art Resources, item no. 34883), which was apparently directly based on a Yongle-period set, closely mirrors the present example: the arhat sits on an ornately-decorated textile on a rounded knoll, his left hand supporting a porcelain bowl and his right delicately holding a brush or stick with which he indicates towards an open book resting on another elaborate textile on a rocky crag, with a three-legged incense burner and circular box and cover nearby. An attendant with straight cropped hair garbed in blue robes and holding a fan of bird feathers stands to his proper left, looking off into the distance. The only major differences in composition between the present work and the Palace Museum example is the presence of the two birds in the bottom left corner, which are missing in the later example, and the diminutive images of Manjushri and a Tibetan lama in the sky above Pindola in the eighteenth-century example, which are not found in the present work. Because of the large number of sets of arhat paintings that were created following a single, Yongle-period prototype, it can be difficult to assign individual paintings to a larger group. The present work, however, seems closely related to a painting of Angaja in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (acc. no. 1993.306), tentatively dated to the seventeenth century: compare the treatment of the robes and textiles, particularly that which the arhats sit on, with foliate scroll similar to that found on Yongle-period blue-and-white porcelain, as well as the treatment of the tree behind the main figures, particularly the way the bark is delineated with long, parallel brush strokes and the leaves with short dabs. See, also, a painting of Vajraputra in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. no. 1992.198), attributed to the fifteenth century; the treatment of the attendant figure and ritual objects between the Met example and the current work are remarkably similar, although the composition of the Met example differs slightly from that of the eighteenth-century National Palace Museum example, which was supposedly modeled upon a Yongle-period original.

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