17TH-18TH CENTURY

Details

A FINELY-CAST GILT-BRONZE FIGURE OF SEVEN-HEADED AVALOKITESHVARA
17TH-18TH CENTURY
The figure is shown seated in dhyanasana, wearing a dhoti secured by beaded jewelry around the waist and draped across the legs, the borders incised with a lotus pattern repeated on the shawl draped over the shoulders, and a celestial scarf is wrapped around the arms and falls to the lotus base. The primary hands are held before the chest in vajra-anjalikarmamudra, and a subsidiary pair are held in the lap in dhyanamudra, supporting an alms bowl, with the remaining twenty pairs of arms radiating out from the shoulders and each hand either holding an attribute or positioned in a mudra. The twenty-first pair of hands is raised to hold the figure of Amitabha on a lotus platform above three tiers of heads, of which the two lower tiers have three heads each, and the top tier has a single head.
12 ¾ in. (32 cm.) high

Provenance

Christie's Hong Kong, 29 October 1995, lot 648.
Christie's London, 13 November 2001, lot 113.

Lot Essay

A related seven-headed gilt-bronze figure of Avalokiteshvara, with only twenty-four-arms, also holding an Amitabha Buddha above the topmost head, dated to 16th-17th century, is in the Chang Foundation, and is illustrated by James Spencer, Buddhist Images in Gilt Metal, Taipei, 1993, pp. 86-87, no. 36. A similar figure with ten heads and forty-six arms dated to Qing dynasty is in the Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Museum für Völkerkunde, West Germany, illustrated in Hai-wai Yi-chen (Chinese Art in Overseas Collections), Buddhist Sculpture II, p. 200, pl. 190. Another seven-headed figure, shown standing and dated to the cyclical xinwei year, corresponding to 1691, was sold at Christie's Hong Kong, 29 November 2017, lot 2922.

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