A RARE GILT-BRONZE FIGURE OF AVALOKITESHVARA

Description:

China, Sui or early Tang dynasty
H. 20,8 cm
This emphatically slender statuette shows the Bodhisattva Guanyin, traditionally the Chinese equivalent of the Tibetan Bodhisattva Avalokitesvara, standing in the midst of an elaborately openworked flame mandorla and on a lotus base, the square pedestal below cast as a separate section. The elongated figure and the elaborately openworked mandorla with naturalistic flickering flames suggest a dating to the Sui period or early Tang dynasty.
Important Austrian private collection, acquired in the early 1990s from E. & J. Frankel in New York, according to their information from an old New York private collection.
Publ. Zeileis: "From Shang to Qing - Three and a Half Millennia of Chinese Bronze", 1999, No. 153, pp. 372-373
See a similar piece for this elegant style characteristic of the Sui, an equally remarkable slender standing Avalokitesvara, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Rogers Fund, 1912), can be found, along with other examples published: Christian Deydier, Chinese Bronzes, New York 1980, p.160 as no.126. Buddhist representations from the Sui period are remarkably rare, probably a consequence of her short reign of only 27 years. But, although they were a purely Han Chinese dynasty, they promoted Buddhism to such a high degree that it rose to become the official state religion throughout China during their reign
Old rep. break at the neck, base with short break at one corner