Footnotes

A GILT COPPER ALLOY FIGURE OF RISHABHANATHA
SOUTH INDIA, CIRCA 9TH CENTURY

印度南部 約九世紀 銅鎏金勒舍婆那陀像

Provenance:
With Claude de Marteau, Brussels, by 1970s

This charming little bronze depicting Rishabhanatha commands a much larger presence. Rishabhanatha was the first of twenty-four great teachers within the Jain religion known as Tirthankaras, reputed to have lived millions of years ago. He is also one of the five most popularly worshipped Tirthankaras. With an alert gaze, he is seated in meditation, his shoulders drawn forward, allowing the arms to be secured well into the lap, with the right hand placed on the left palm, thumbs nearly touching. His torso is well-defined and 'sky-clad' (naked), according to the Digambara Jain sect. A small cranial protuberance (ushnisha) surmounts his head, a feature that is occasionally represented in Jain figures. The back is cast as beautifully as the front, showing the long tresses that identify Rishabhanatha flowing past his shoulders.

While having no immediate published comparison, this enigmatic gilded figure almost certainly belongs to the small corpus of Jain bronzes from Karnataka or Tamil Nadu in South India, where Jainism experienced a revival in the 8th and 9th centuries. Most indicative of this, he is shown seated with one leg folded over the other in the Southern depiction of the meditation pose, as opposed to the North's 'double lotus' position. Secondly, the Digambara sect to which this bronze pertains was most prominent in South India at the time. A c.9th-century bronze Rishabhanatha from Karnataka, formerly in the collection of Siddharth K. Bhansali was sold at Bonhams, New York, 16 March 2021, lot 333. The present sculpture's peculiar triangular base suggests the Jina may have once sat within a yantra or mandala, or belonged to a Sarvatobhadra shrine composed of Tirthankaras arranged in pyramidal tiers, such as a late Chalukya example from the 12th-13th century published in Sivaramamurti (ed.), Panorama of Jain Art, 1983, p. 246, no. 352.