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Lot Essay
This luminous painting of the Hindu goddess Bagalamukhi is an extraordinary addition to the oeuvre of Payag (active c.1591-1658), a Mughal master with a lifelong fascination with European effects. Payag’s captivating body of work blends carefully observed renderings of volume, texture, and physiognomic idiosyncrasies with an unconventional, occasionally visionary spirit. His subject here is Bagalamukhi, the eighth of the ten mahavidyas (great revelations), a group of fearsome Tantric manifestations of the Goddess that parallels the ten avataras of Vishnu but is generated in response to the inadvertent insult of Sati, Shiva’s wife, when the couple are not invited to attend the sacrifice of her father, Daksha (Kinsley, 1986, p.162). Bagalamukhi is eclipsed in myth and art by her better-known counterparts – Kali, Tara, Chinnamasta, and Bhairavi. It is telling that the last of these, the terrifying and macabre Bhairavi, is also depicted by Payag, raising the intriguing possibility that a Mughal patron with a strong interest in Hindu mythology commissioned Payag to create a partial or perhaps even full set of the mahavidyas. The horizontal format painting, now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2011.409), is very similar in size (18.5 x 26.5 cm.). The painting was sold at Sotheby’s, London, 31 May 2011, lot 5.
Bagalamukhi, whose epithet is Pitambara-devi (Yellow Goddess), is identified iconographically by skin rubbed yellow with turmeric paste, yellow dress and ornaments, a club brandished in her right hand to thrash Madanasura, and the action of grasping the demon’s tongue to silence him. Among her magical powers is the capacity to bestow perfect speech that will defeat any enemy. She is thus known as the Paralyzer, and deprives her wicked adversary of his boon of vak siddhi, that is, actualising speech that makes things come to pass (Kinsley, 1977, pp.195-196). She exercises this power by physically taking hold of her enemy’s tongue. Seated atop the demon with an intervening layer of lotus leaves, Bagalamukhi occupies the centre of a golden hexagonal shrine that features a low platform, two domes, and a soaring pyramidal superstructure. Each of the eight balustre columns is studded with jewels, as are parts of both domes and the superstructure, sometimes with rubies and emeralds set in simple alternation, and sometimes as they are incorporated into large geometric medallions and floral motifs. Above dado panels with a scrolling border design are six niches filled individually with a blue-and-white vase or bottle, each of which has coiling ceramic or glass handles of European design.
Devotional texts describe the Goddess as wearing a yellow crescent moon in her headdress, but that feature is transformed here into a horizontally disposed third eye on her brow. Seen in her four-armed manifestation, the nimbate Bagalamukhi holds a large white club or paddle in her upper right hand, and pulls out the tongue of an emaciated Madanasura with one of her left hands. The other hands are engaged in less consequential actions: one holds a thin cord that terminates in a sketchy, barely discernible noose, and the other rests lightly on her foot, which itself is positioned beside a short white plank laid across the demon’s exposed ribcage. Her other foot presses down on the anguished head of the sinewy brown-skinned creature. The dais is strewn with yellow blossoms, and two garlands of yellow oleander flowers, whose medical properties aptly turn poisonous when the plant is misused, fill the upper corners. The vanquished Madanasura is supine here, a position unlike the crouching figure enlisted in the other known historical depiction of Bagalamukhi, but one that clearly taps into Tantric imagery of shava sadhana, a spiritual practice standing or sitting on a corpse. For a c. 1800 Garhwal painting of this subject, see Kinsley 1997, p.200, fig.33. The edge of the dais is decorated with a band of lotus blossoms, rhizomes, and leaves, motifs that are repeated in a lightly articulated and evenly spaced manner in the white ocean of nectar surrounding the shrine.
This powerful work has many of the hallmarks of Payag’s distinctive personal style. Most revealing is the ambitious rendering of Bagalamukhi’s round face, seen frontally as befits a deity, but modelled with nuanced stippling, and given a triumphant grin and knowing sidelong leer. Her nose is long with wide nostrils, her eyes softly defined and set slightly asymmetrically, and her eye sockets remarkably sculpted. All these features are favoured by Payag in figures seen directly head-on, notably in one of the courtiers behind the emperor’s horse in Jahangir Converses with Gosain Jadrup (Musée des Arts asiatiques Guimet, Paris, published in Seyller, “Payag”, in Beach, Fischer, and Goswamy, 2011, Vol. 1, p.326, fig.4.); warriors in the lower right in the c. 1633 Siege of Qandahar ( Padshahnama, f. 102b, Royal Library, Windsor, published in Seyller 2011, p.330, fig. 7) and the c. 1640 Soldiers Listen to Music beneath a Mango Tree (Chester Beatty Library, published in Seyller 2011, p.334, fig.10) and several grinning figures in A Qazi’s Debauchery Exposed (Private collection, published in Goswamy and Fischer, 1987), no.32).
Payag’s modelling of Bagalamukhi’s torso, forearms, and hands imparts convincing volume to those anatomical forms. The artist brings real painterly flare to her diaphanous robe, whose extravagant rivulets of golden paint spill over her shoulders and lower body. He dramatises the halo by varying the length and thickness of rays radiating across a dark doorway and over adjacent architectural forms. Madan’s face is contorted in wonderfully poignant agony, but otherwise strongly resembles an ascetic in an ascribed painting of c. 1620-25. (Ascetics by a Fire, Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, E-14, f. 44a, published in Seyller 2011, p.328, fig.5).
Payag manages to make the golden shrine three-dimensional by an extensive use of hachures adapted from European engravings, most conspicuously on the shrine’s dado, floor, and steps and along the smaller pavilion’s dome and eaves; these are complemented by geometric shapes scored discreetly in the podium. He draws upon European art once again for the bulky, graphically articulated cumulus clouds that billow up within a flamboyantly streaky sky.
We would like to thank John Seyller for his assistance with cataloguing this lot.
Bagalamukhi, whose epithet is Pitambara-devi (Yellow Goddess), is identified iconographically by skin rubbed yellow with turmeric paste, yellow dress and ornaments, a club brandished in her right hand to thrash Madanasura, and the action of grasping the demon’s tongue to silence him. Among her magical powers is the capacity to bestow perfect speech that will defeat any enemy. She is thus known as the Paralyzer, and deprives her wicked adversary of his boon of vak siddhi, that is, actualising speech that makes things come to pass (Kinsley, 1977, pp.195-196). She exercises this power by physically taking hold of her enemy’s tongue. Seated atop the demon with an intervening layer of lotus leaves, Bagalamukhi occupies the centre of a golden hexagonal shrine that features a low platform, two domes, and a soaring pyramidal superstructure. Each of the eight balustre columns is studded with jewels, as are parts of both domes and the superstructure, sometimes with rubies and emeralds set in simple alternation, and sometimes as they are incorporated into large geometric medallions and floral motifs. Above dado panels with a scrolling border design are six niches filled individually with a blue-and-white vase or bottle, each of which has coiling ceramic or glass handles of European design.
Devotional texts describe the Goddess as wearing a yellow crescent moon in her headdress, but that feature is transformed here into a horizontally disposed third eye on her brow. Seen in her four-armed manifestation, the nimbate Bagalamukhi holds a large white club or paddle in her upper right hand, and pulls out the tongue of an emaciated Madanasura with one of her left hands. The other hands are engaged in less consequential actions: one holds a thin cord that terminates in a sketchy, barely discernible noose, and the other rests lightly on her foot, which itself is positioned beside a short white plank laid across the demon’s exposed ribcage. Her other foot presses down on the anguished head of the sinewy brown-skinned creature. The dais is strewn with yellow blossoms, and two garlands of yellow oleander flowers, whose medical properties aptly turn poisonous when the plant is misused, fill the upper corners. The vanquished Madanasura is supine here, a position unlike the crouching figure enlisted in the other known historical depiction of Bagalamukhi, but one that clearly taps into Tantric imagery of shava sadhana, a spiritual practice standing or sitting on a corpse. For a c. 1800 Garhwal painting of this subject, see Kinsley 1997, p.200, fig.33. The edge of the dais is decorated with a band of lotus blossoms, rhizomes, and leaves, motifs that are repeated in a lightly articulated and evenly spaced manner in the white ocean of nectar surrounding the shrine.
This powerful work has many of the hallmarks of Payag’s distinctive personal style. Most revealing is the ambitious rendering of Bagalamukhi’s round face, seen frontally as befits a deity, but modelled with nuanced stippling, and given a triumphant grin and knowing sidelong leer. Her nose is long with wide nostrils, her eyes softly defined and set slightly asymmetrically, and her eye sockets remarkably sculpted. All these features are favoured by Payag in figures seen directly head-on, notably in one of the courtiers behind the emperor’s horse in Jahangir Converses with Gosain Jadrup (Musée des Arts asiatiques Guimet, Paris, published in Seyller, “Payag”, in Beach, Fischer, and Goswamy, 2011, Vol. 1, p.326, fig.4.); warriors in the lower right in the c. 1633 Siege of Qandahar ( Padshahnama, f. 102b, Royal Library, Windsor, published in Seyller 2011, p.330, fig. 7) and the c. 1640 Soldiers Listen to Music beneath a Mango Tree (Chester Beatty Library, published in Seyller 2011, p.334, fig.10) and several grinning figures in A Qazi’s Debauchery Exposed (Private collection, published in Goswamy and Fischer, 1987), no.32).
Payag’s modelling of Bagalamukhi’s torso, forearms, and hands imparts convincing volume to those anatomical forms. The artist brings real painterly flare to her diaphanous robe, whose extravagant rivulets of golden paint spill over her shoulders and lower body. He dramatises the halo by varying the length and thickness of rays radiating across a dark doorway and over adjacent architectural forms. Madan’s face is contorted in wonderfully poignant agony, but otherwise strongly resembles an ascetic in an ascribed painting of c. 1620-25. (Ascetics by a Fire, Russian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts, E-14, f. 44a, published in Seyller 2011, p.328, fig.5).
Payag manages to make the golden shrine three-dimensional by an extensive use of hachures adapted from European engravings, most conspicuously on the shrine’s dado, floor, and steps and along the smaller pavilion’s dome and eaves; these are complemented by geometric shapes scored discreetly in the podium. He draws upon European art once again for the bulky, graphically articulated cumulus clouds that billow up within a flamboyantly streaky sky.
We would like to thank John Seyller for his assistance with cataloguing this lot.