Cultural object
Bust of Hevajra
The Bust of Hevajra is a Khmer stone sculpture of the late 12th or early 13th century from Angkor, Cambodia, in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.[1][2] It is the upper part of a statue about 3 meters (10 feet) high whose legs were found in the forest near Angkor Thom in 2009.[3][4]
The object
This fragmentary colossal bust of the Esoteric Buddhist god Hevajra has seven heads, each with a smile. The four large lower heads face the four directions, and the upper heads face the front and sides. An eighth small head that once faced forward and crowned the sculpture is missing.[1] The bust measures 132.1 by 73.7 centimeters (52 by 29 inches).[2] Parts of the surface are rough, which suggests that it was never completed.[1] The full figure was carved from sandstone and had eight heads and sixteen arms.[3] The museum's accession number is 36.96.4.[1][5]
Iconography
Hevajra is a Tantric Buddhist god, and his eight heads identify this figure.[1] Most Khmer images of Hevajra show him dancing. The sculpture was possibly intended to represent the dancing Hevajra, which would have had eight arms on each side, as small Khmer bronzes of the god do.[1][6] The bust alone does not settle whether the figure danced, though the set of the heads and shoulders may suggest movement.[6] The legs later found near Angkor Thom are in the dancing pose of other Hevajra statues of the period.[4] Comparisons with Khmer bronze images indicate that Hevajra's wrathful nature could be shown through open eyes rather than an especially fierce face.[6]
Once identified by some as an eleven-headed Avalokitesvara missing its upper tier of heads, the bust is now recognized as Hevajra.[6] The museum's curator Alan Priest published it as Hevajra in 1937, after concluding that it had eight heads and sixteen arms.[6][3]
Date and origin
The Metropolitan Museum of Art dates the sculpture to the late twelfth or early thirteenth century.[2] Its style is that of the Bayon, the temple-mountain at the center of Angkor Thom that King Jayavarman VII built for the cult of the king as a divine ruler.[2] Jayavarman VII reigned from 1181 to 1219, and the Bayon was one of the last major monuments of the Khmer Empire.[2] The statue is counted among the largest of the late Angkor period.[4] Scholars increasingly see the royal cult of Angkor around 1200 as centered on Hevajra.[3]
Provenance
The bust comes from the ruins of Angkor in northwestern Cambodia and is said to have been found near the East Gate of Angkor Thom, also called the Gate of the Dead.[1] French archaeologists uncovered the broken statue in 1925, apparently with other Buddhist sculptures in an earthen mound. They took the bust to a conservation depot and apparently left the legs where they lay.[3] Ten years later the French School of the Far East (École Française d'Extrême-Orient) sold the bust to the Metropolitan Museum as an image of Avalokitesvara, together with other important Khmer sculptures.[3][6] The museum gives the credit line as the Fletcher Fund, 1936.[1]
In 1969, fragments of a badly damaged stone Hevajra in Cambodia, from a chapel east of the Gate of the Dead, were identified as parts of the same image, showing Hevajra dancing. The same chapel yielded several images of Lokesvara.[6] In 2009, 84 years after the first find, the researcher Peter Sharrock found the statue's massive legs in the forest outside the walls of Angkor Thom. The morning after he reported the find at a conference, the legs were moved from the forest to the Sihanouk Museum in Siem Reap.[3] Other parts of the figure, including its arms, one head and legs, remain outside the museum's collection. The APSARA heritage authority planned an excavation to search for the missing eighth head, the arms and the feet.[3]
How and when the statue was broken and left outside Angkor Thom is not known. Sharrock suggests that it may have been taken from the Bayon and ritually smashed during a later reaction against Jayavarman VII's Buddhist temples, perhaps a century after the king's death.[3] As of 2010, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the museums in Phnom Penh were expected to discuss whether and how to reunite and show the parts of the statue.[3]
Display
The Metropolitan Museum of Art displays the sculpture in Gallery 249 at its Fifth Avenue location.[2] It is part of the museum's highlights of Southeast Asian art.[7]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 The Metropolitan Museum of Art
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 metmuseum.org, Bust of Hevajra - Cambodia - Angkor period (2022-06-09)
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 blog.andybrouwer.co.uk, Peter Sharrock - Andy's Cambodia: www.andybrouwer.co.uk (2010-04-17)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Spencer Ames, Hevajra in Cambodia (PDF, 2019)
- ↑ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, An Intern at The Met: When Science Meets Art (2018-09-05)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 Angkor Database, Tantric Buddhism at Angkor Thom (PDF)
- ↑ The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Highlights of Southeast Asian Art (2022-06-09)