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Ivanova E. Sculptural Representations of Maitreya from the Mainland East Asia in the Kunstkamera (The Problem of Identification)

Elena Ivanova
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation
ORCID: 0000-0001-7837-7826
E-mail: elivan@kunstkamera.ru; roxyivanova@yandex.ru

 

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ABSTRACT. In his article “On some images of Maitreya” in the first volume of the MAE Collection of Articles, 120 years ago, S. F. Oldenburg drew the readers’ attention to the problem of the impossibility of identifying Buddhist deities by their appearance due to the centuries-old tradition of depicting the same deity in very diverse ways. Using the example of Maitreya, Oldenburg showed what analyzing the iconography of a monument of Buddhist sculpture means and called for documentation and study of all its many variants. The article examines the iconography of two types of images of Maitreya identified in the East Asian Buddhist collections of the Kunstkamera. The first traditional type, especially popular with the followers of the Tibeto-Mongolian form of Mahayana Buddhism, is represented by 21 bronze images. Almost each is endowed with an individual set of iconographic features. The Maitreyas of this group represent 19 variants of iconography. The second type is Budai Hashan (6 images made of different materials), which is the result of transformation of the image of Maitreya in China, has a special uniform iconography differing from the traditional iconography of Maitreyas. In the literature, the iconography of Maitreya is defined as a combination of three features: the so-called “Postures of Maitreya”, the gesture of dharmachakramudra, and kalasa attribute. Judging by the images of the Kunstkamera Maitreyas (those of the first type), only the dominance of the latter attribute over the other allows us to consider legitimate inclusion of kalasa in the formula of a “typical Maitreya”, while the other two features are characteristic of only two of the sculptures.

 

KEYWORDS: Kunstkamera, Oldenburg, East Asian Buddhist collections, iconography, Maitreya, Budai-Hashan

 

DOI 10.31250/2618-8619-2022-1(15)-201-219
УДК 069:39

 

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