CHINE XVIIe SIÈCLE

= Exceptional white marble statue with a beige patina shaded with brown, representing Avalokiteshvara, bodhisattva of Compassion, known as Guanshiyin ("He who perceives the accents [of the world]"), often abbreviated to Guanyin. The deity stands on a double lotiform base. She holds a vase of lustral water in her left hand along her body while she holds a willow branch against her bust with her right hand. She is dressed in a long dhoti falling on her feet, her shoulders covered by floating ribbons. She is adorned with a complex set of gold-plated and beaded jewelry, earrings, pectoral, long necklaces crisscrossing at the waist and falling to her feet and gold-plated belts. The hair, raised in a high complex bun, is encircled by a diadem holding a veil falling on her shoulders and presents three medallions decorated with lotus petals, the central one bearing the character Fo ("Buddha"). The face is full with square jaws, marked by two eyebrows incised in perfect arcs of a circle, the eyes very stretched, the mouth smiling. The expression is benevolent and full of compassion. The neck with the modelling worked with the three folds of wisdom. Presented on a quadrangular stone base. H. 128,5 cm - W. 45 cm - D. 20 cm H. with base : 146 cm PROVENANCE Private collection in Paris of Mr L. constituted on three generations since the end of the 19th century. In the 6th or 5th century B.C., Siddhartha Gautama, a Nepalese prince from Kapilavastu, renounced the world to find the way to salvation. After many encounters, he will reach the Awakening and the knowledge of the "Four Noble Truths" allowing to find the way to the cessation of the suffering, towards the nirvana, ineffable state of not rebirth. He then gave his teaching to a community of followers and monks who, after his death, continued to keep his teaching alive and to spread it throughout Asia, giving birth to Buddhism. Buddhism was very successful in India and then spread throughout Asia via the trade routes. Two main lines of transmission then emerged, taking on very different expressions. In Southeast Asia, the Theravada where only the Buddha is revered, while in the north the Mahayana and Vajrayana traditions are born where different Buddhas rub shoulders with innumerable Bodhisattvas and other protective deities. Buddhism reached China around the 2nd century B.C. via the Silk Roads, through the kingdoms of Central Asia, but it lacked real institutional support to develop on a large scale. It was not until the 4th century that the Wei kingdom (386 - 534) was the first to make Buddhism a state religion. The Sui (581 - 619), great unifiers of China The Sui (581 - 619), great unifiers of China, made Buddhism an eminently political religion, seeing it as a means of unifying the territory and consolidating their power. This period saw an intense activity of collection and translation of new texts, giving birth to many new currents. Monasteries, sanctuaries and Buddhist caves with painted or sculpted representations of this new religion also multiplied. The Chinese Buddhism takes a considerable rise and its community acquires a power without precedent. The period from the beginning of the 7th century to the middle of the 9th century is considered the golden age of Buddhism in China. It is only in the middle of the 9th century that its development knows a brutal stop. Emperor Wuzong of the Tang, strongly hostile to foreign religions, forbade Buddhism. It was not until the advent of the Mongolian Yuan dynasty in 1279 that Buddhism returned to the forefront, but in a different form, that of Vajrayana Buddhism, which originated in Tibet and continued to flourish in Mongolia during the Ming reign, and then in China under the Qing. The present statue, although probably executed in the probably executed in the 17th century, takes us back to the sources of Chinese Buddhism, in the period of intense artistic and intellectual activity that was the 6th and 7th centuries in China. The hieratic style of the statue perpetuates certain styles of the Northern dynasties, but there is a hint of an orientation towards a more pronounced realism in the modeling of the flesh. The influence of Central Asian representations and, by extension, of the Indianized sphere is still very strong in this representation of a bodhisattva wearing numerous scarves and gold-plated jewelry. In the same way, the treatment of the hair in large locks, the incised eyebrows drawing arcs of a circle, the strongly slanted eyes, the square face recall the sculptures of the Dunhuang caves of the early Tang period. CONDITION REPORT Wear, light scratches, a crack on the back of the cavetto, a crack on the cavetto