Page 219 - Sotheby's October 3 2017 Tantra Buddhost Art

fig. 1
Gilt-bronze figure of Shakyamuni Buddha,
mark and period of Yongle,
from the Speelman collection,
Sotheby’s Hong Kong, 7th October 2006, lot 808
same structure of the flame-shaped mandorla, filled with
dense scroll containing luxuriant blossoms of Indian lotus.
The same treatment of the throne, mandorla and Indian
lotus decoration can also be clearly seen on an image of a
Bodhisattva on one of the leaves of the album, Collection of
Buddhist Sutras, dated twelfth year of the Yongle reign (1414), in any museum collection. The only other example recorded
sold in our New York rooms, 19th March 2015, lot 427, and
now in the Long Museum, Shanghai (fig. 2).
A Yuan dynasty prototype for the current stele can be
seen in a sculpture on the so-called Cloud Platform at the
Juyongguan, created between 1343 to 1353, at a mountain
pass northwest of Beijing through which the Great Wall
passes, illustrated in Defining Yongle: Imperial Art in Early
Fifteenth-Century China, op. cit., fig. 14. The iconography is
almost identical, with matching elements including the throne
and lotus pedestal, but the depiction of the Buddha on the
current Yongle stele is more at ease, with softer contours
and a greater degree of naturalism in the freely draping
robes. The unusual carved imagery on the current stele of
a garuda depicted biting nagas (snake deities) reveals the
influence of Indian and Nepalese motifs introduced to China
via Tibet during the Yuan dynasty. Such images of Garuda
continued to be used in the Yongle period, as shown by an
extant brightly-coloured earthenware figure of Garuda now
preserved in the Nanjing Municipal Museum, originally created
to adorn one of the arched doorways of the pagoda at Da
THE HEART OF TANTRA – BUDDHIST ART INCLUDING PROPERTY FROM THE NYINGJEI LAM COLLECTION 217
fig. 2
Collection of Buddhist sutras, mark and period of Yongle, detail
Sotheby’s New York 19th March 2015, lot 427.
Baoensi commissioned by the Yongle Emperor in Nanjing to
commemorate his parents, illustrated in Ming. Fifty Years that
Changed China, op. cit., fig. 190.
No other comparable Yongle stele appears to be preserved
in private hands is a stylistically identical limestone stele
of Shakyamuni Buddha of matching size and iconography,
marginally differing in the depiction of the mythical animals
enclosed within the mandorla, illustrated in Kaikodo Journal,
no. 5, Autumn, 1997, no. 88, and sold at Christie’s New
York, 21st September 2004, lot 139. This stele, formerly in
the collection of Emmanuel Dimitri Gran (1894-1969), was
reputed to have come from a pagoda in Nanjing. Emmanuel
Gran, an architect from St Petersburg who escaped the
Russian Revolution and moved to Shanghai after 1917,
amassed a collection of Chinese art in the 1920s and 30s.
After moving to California in 1948, he eventually in New York,
where he worked as an architect for the Hilton hotels. It
seems highly possible that the current stele, acquired in San
Francisco in 1948, was originally collected together. Certainly,
the historical context, combined with the precise iconography
and artistic style of the current stele, would support it being
the legacy of an Imperial project by the Yongle Emperor at
Nanjing.