A COPPER ALLOY FIGURE OF MAHAKALA PANJARANATA


TIBET, 14TH CENTURYHimalayan Art Resources item no.61940 6 3/8 in. (16.2 cm) high
|西藏 十四世紀 兩臂大黑天銅像 Mahakala holds a ritual knife over a skull bowl, while clutching the skull-scepter in the crook of his left arm. He is clad in snakes and wears a tiger skin, which the artist has chased into a mesmerizing pattern. This corpulent and hieratic bronze figure of Mahakala standing on a corpse closely follows formal iconographic conventions for the protector deity established in Pala and Licchavi art. A Pala precedent for this mode of depiction is exemplified by a c.11th-century stele of Mahakala from Lakhi Sarai (Bautze-Picron, "An Indian Site of Late Buddhist Iconography and Its Position within the Asian Buddhist World", in Silk Road Art and Archaeology, vol.2, 1991/2, fig.16). Meanwhile, a 9th-century Licchavi stele in the Syambunath Museum, Kathmandu, provides a precedent for the subject in Nepal (Huntington Archive 50555). Mahakala is here depicted as a protector of the Hevajra Tantra, and the treatment of this figure's base suggests it was part of a larger ensemble, perhaps dedicated to Hevajra. The bronze's style and brassy alloy are suggestive of the region of Mustang, bordering Nepal and Tibet. Published Helmut Uhlig, Tantrische Kunst des Buddhismus, Berlin, 1981, p.222, no.107. Provenance Nik Douglas, New York, 1981 Private New York Collection