Page 384 - Chinese Works of Art Chritie's Mar. 22-23 2018

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RUBBING FROM THE QIFOTA
(SEVEN BUDDHA PAGODA)
QIANLONG PERIOD, DATED BY INSCRIPTION
TO THE DINGYOU (1777)
Depicting Shakyamuni Buddha at center fanked
by attendants, with two disciples below fanked by
Shakyamuni’s parents, with explanatory inscriptions
above in Tibetan, Mongolian, Manchu, and Chinese,
all within emblem and dragon borders.
43¿ x 26Ω in. (109.5 x 67.3 cm.)
$10,000-15,000

PROVENANCE
Baron Alexander von Staël-Holstein (1877-1937)
Collection.
The present work is part of a set of rubbings
commissioned by the Emperor Qianlong himself.
In 1777, the Panchen Lama of Tibet presented the
emperor with a set of seven paintings of the ‘Seven
Buddhas of the Past’. Although largely formulaic, the
paintings were unusual in that each painting also
included the parents of each Buddha in the lower
right corners, seemingly contradicting the Buddhist
principle of detachment from family in the fulfllment
of enlightenment. Patricia Berger, in Empire of
Emptiness: Buddhist Art and Political Authority in Qing
China, United Kingdom, 2003, pp. 186-87, posits that
this might have been an intentional act of compassion
from the Panchen Lama to Qianlong, who had just
lost his mother. The emperor was so taken by the
paintings that he ordered the construction of the
Qifota (Seven Buddha Pagoda), an eight-sided column
with carved reproductions of the seven paintings. He
also ordered that rubbings be made from the stone
column and distributed to the Dalai Lama and to
various palace collections. For another rubbing from
the same group, but depicting Kanakamuni Buddha,
in the collection of the Palace Museum in Beijing, see
ibid., p. 188, fg. 64.
Baron Alexander von Staël-Holstein (1877-1937) was
an early Western scholar of Sanskrit, Tibetan, and
Chinese languages, who contributed to the translation
of several important Buddhist texts. In the 1920s
and 30s, he was a professor of Sanskrit, Tibetan
and History of Indian Religions at Peking University
in Beijing, and in 1928 was a visiting professor at
Harvard, helping the Harvard-Yenching Institute to
collect important books. A selection of the illustrated
literature von Staël-Holstein brought with him from
Beijing to Harvard was compiled by Walter Eugene
Clark to form the seminal 1937 Two Lamaistic
Pantheons, one of the earliest Western references of
Qing-dynasty Buddhist iconography.
清乾隆丁酉年(1777) 欽定釋迦牟尼佛唐卡烏金拓

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