A BRONZE FIGURE OF MAITREYA SWAT VALLEY, 7TH/8TH CENTURY

拍品描述

A BRONZE FIGURE OF MAITREYA, SWAT VALLEY, 7TH/8TH CENTURY Cast seated in lalitasana upon a lotus base, the right leg pendant and the left drawn up horizontally across the seat, the bodhisattva is modelled with broad shoulders, a softly defined torso and full chest. The right hand rests at the knee in varada mudra, while the raised left arm originally held an attribute now lost. He wears a beaded necklace falling in a single heavy strand across the chest, large circular earrings, and a tall foliate crown rising in three pointed leaves above a band of bosses, with ribbons looped to either side of the head behind elongated ears. A dhoti is indicated by parallel incised folds gathered between the legs and across the pendant ankle, and the lower garment falls in a fan of pleats over the front of the lotus seat. The lotus base is double-tiered, the upper register pierced and articulated with a row of beaded ornament above a broad band of rounded petals. The surface carries an extensive cuprite and malachite patina with scattered earthen encrustation, and the metal has a warm reddish-brown tone visible where the patina has thinned. The figure is identifiable as Maitreya, the Buddha of the future age, by the combination of princely bodhisattva ornament with the elevated seated posture and the placement of the attribute, which in this iconographic family would have been the kundika water flask held at the left shoulder. Maitreya is shown not as an enlightened Buddha but as a bodhisattva still resident in the Tushita heaven, where he awaits the moment of his descent. The pendant-legged posture, rather than the more usual padmasana of meditating bodhisattvas, evokes readiness, the figure poised to rise. In Swat Valley bronzes this pose is closely associated with Maitreya and distinguishes him from related figures of Avalokiteshvara cast in the same workshops. The Swat Valley, the ancient region of Uddiyana in present-day northern Pakistan, was one of the principal centres of Buddhist bronze production between the seventh and ninth centuries. Its sculptors worked at the meeting point of the late Gandharan tradition, post-Gupta Indian models, and the emerging tantric currents that would soon pass northward into Tibet, where Swat bronzes were preserved in temple treasuries and copied for centuries afterward. The choice of solid-cast bronze, often with silver and copper inlay in the more elaborate examples, carried prestige beyond the material itself: such images were portable, durable, and suited to the long-distance devotional networks that linked Uddiyana to monastic centres across the western Himalayas. The heavy malachite and cuprite encrustation seen here is characteristic of bronzes recovered from this region and is consistent with long burial or deposition. Stylistically, the broad facial type with arched brows meeting at the bridge of the nose, the small pursed mouth, the foliate triple-leaf crown, and the heavy beaded jewellery all belong to the established Swat repertoire of the seventh to eighth centuries. The treatment of the lotus base, with its pierced upper tier and bold rounded petals, is a further marker of the regional workshop tradition. This figure exemplifies the small-scale Swat Valley devotional bronze of the early medieval period, an object made for personal worship or shrine use that carried the iconographic vocabulary of Uddiyana Buddhism into the wider Himalayan world. Its surviving condition, with deep patination and the loss of the original attribute, is typical of the group, and its modelling preserves the distinctive synthesis of Gandharan inheritance and Indic bodhisattva form that defines Swat production at its height. Height: 14.5cm

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