DENSATIL, CENTRAL TIBET, 14TH CENTURY Himalayan Art Resources item no.4505 32 x 37.5 cm (12 5/8 x 14 3/4 in.)Footnotes丹薩替 藏中 十四世紀 銅鎏金供養天女飾板 From the 13th to 15th century, an early Kagyu order known as the Phagmo Drupa rose to great prominence in Central Tibet. Its monastic seat of power, Densatil, was built on the final resting place of the order's eponymous founder Phagmo Drupa Dorje Gyalpo (1110-70). As the sect grew in wealth and political power, eight lavishly decorated monumental stupas, known as tashi gomang ("many doors of auspiciousness") were constructed in Densatil monastery's main hall. These multi-tiered structures were covered by Buddhist gilt bronze sculptures and relief panels, each of astonishing quality. Their splendor was captured on black and white film by the Italian photographer Pietro Francesco Mele, who was invited by Giuseppe Tucci on an expedition to Densatil in 1948. Most of these tashi gomang stupas were created following similar blueprints, consisting of six stepped tiers. The present panel would have been placed on the fifth tier (working top to bottom), joined by fifteen similar panels each depicting four dancing offering goddesses in high relief. These sixteen panels were evenly distributed between the four directions of the stupa. On each of the four sides, three female deities would appear in the center, flanked by two of these panels (see Czaja & Proser, Golden Visions of Densatil, New York, 2014, pp.38-9). Several panels are now dispersed throughout important museum and private collections worldwide and the surviving corpus demonstrates some variation in style and quality across the roughly 160 years the eight tashi gomang stupas were built (1270s-1430s). The present panel ranks among the highest quality. These four dancing goddesses are skillfully modelled with Newari-inspired sensuous bodies laden with semi-precious stones. Their hair is neatly arranged into a fan-shaped chignon bound into five vertical sections, each topped with a jewel. The large, plump lotus petals below their feet are of superior quality. The density of casting and gilding is characteristic of Densatil sculpture, indicative of the great wealth of its patrons. Several other known panels are very closely related to the current lot and likely from the same stupa, including one sold at Bonhams, London, 8 November 2018, lot 35; another from the collection of David T. Owsley (Czaja & Proser, ibid., pp.118-9, no.23); a third published in Huang, Studies on History of gDan-sa-mthil Monastery of Tibet, 2016, p.358; and a fourth in Ashencaen & Leonov, The Mirror of Mind, 1995, fig.16. For examples of panels with offering goddesses from different Densatil stupas, see Bonhams, Hong Kong, 27 May 2012, lot 281, and London, 8 November 2012, lot 260; Czaja & Proser, op. cit., pp.116-7, nos.21-2; and von Schroeder, Indo-Tibetan Bronzes, 1981, p.430, no.113G. Provenance: Private Hong Kong Collection