Provenance:
Richard R. & Magdalena Ernst Collection
Sotheby’s, New York, March 22, 2018, no. 961
This masterpiece of Tibetan black-ground painting (nagthang) depicts a sixteen-armed, four-legged and four-headed form of Mahakala in union with his consort and surrounded by a further five emanations, one at each side above and three below. The rare iconography is based on texts from the Mahakala Tantra Nama, Fifty Chapter Mahakala Tantra, in the tradition of Abhayakaragupta (d. 1125), the Indian tantric master and abbot of Vikramashila monastery, Bihar. The genesis of the iconography thus has its roots in Pala-period (8th-12th century) India, but it seems that only the four-armed Mahakala from this assembly, upper left, appears in Indian art of the period.[1]
Mahakala appears as Wisdom Protector (dharmapala) in a wrathful form of the primordial Buddha Vajradhara, who is depicted at the apex of the painting flanked by Chakrasamvara and four-armed Bhutadamara Vajrapani. Engaging iconographic details abound, including Mahakala’s rearmost face of a buffalo representing an aspect of Yama, the Lord of Death, the head of Yama held in one of the left hands, and a ferocious buffalo mount trampled on the lotus pedestal below. A scarf is draped modestly over the eyes of the consort’s tiger-skin apron as the goddess wraps her legs around Mahakala’s waist. The head and tail of a flayed elephant-skin cape appear from behind the fan of arms at either side. The superbly-drawn figures with their wrathful expressions, the exquisite attention to detail throughout, the commanding central figure, and the minimal landscape bring to mind two fine examples of this monochrome-background genre of Tibetan painting: the Musée Guimet’s sixteenth-century blue Hevajra[2] and the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century black Chakrasamvara from the Lionel Fournier Collection.[3] This exceptional thangka of Mahakala may be similarly dated to the sixteenth century or early seventeenth century at the latest. No other example of the iconography is recorded from this period.
1 The subject is represented in a 12th-century stone carving in the Victoria & Albert Museum, see Wladimir Zwalf, ed., Buddhism: Art and Faith, London, 1985, p. 113, cat. no. 149
2 Giles Béguin, Les Peintures du Bouddhisme Tibétain, Paris, 1995, pp. 222-223, cat. 140, illus. p. 49
3 Ibid., pp. 229-230, cat. no. 144, and in Béguin, Art ésotérique de l’Himâlaya: La donation Lionel Fournier, Paris, 1990, pp. 129-130, cat. no. 72