As Prasat Kok Po has been my focus today, I wanted to round-up the story with 4 pictures of the Dvarapala due to come under the auction hammer at Koller Auctions in Zurich, Switzerland on 29 November, courtesy of the auction company’s website. Their listing indicates the sandstone guardian is from the 10th century and is 85 cms in height. The provenance says it’s from an old Geneva collection, likely collected in the 1970s, with a suggested auction price upwards of 25,000 Euros. A 1937 photograph from the temple offers up the tantalizing prospect that this Dvarapala is one of two standing to attention inside Sanctuary B of the temple, located a couple of kilometers north of the Western Baray. However, it’s not the only sculpture to have been found at Prasat Kok Po. The temple was originally discovered by Georges Demasur in 1914, the year before he died in the First World War, aged just 28. The temple, dating from the end of the 8th century but extended by different Kings over centuries, according to inscriptions found there, was cleared during the mid-1930s by George Trouve and Philippe Stern, who also uncovered a number of statues including no less than six Dvarapalas! Henri Marchal’s detailed account in 1937 gave a full explanation of their findings.
The other Prasat Kok Po sculptures include a large sandstone boundary marker or stele, sometimes called a Caitya or votive stele, currently on display at the Angkor National Museum. It has the most mini-Vishnu figures of any of the top four stelae of this nature currently housed in museums. The three-feet tall stele has four sides, with seventeen rows of seventeen images of a standing 4-arm Vishnu on two sides (though one side is badly damaged), and 17 rows of 13 images on the other two sides, providing an original total of 1,020. At the top of each side is an arched pediment with four more versions of Vishnu, though only three remain intact – these are two images of a standing Vishnu with four arms and one of him riding his mount Garuda. A five-headed Naga can be seen on each corner. Dedicated as an offering to the protector and savior Vishnu, its exact role in the performance of rituals or the demarcation of the temple is not clear. Elsewhere, Prasat Kok Po is represented at the Guimet Museum in Paris by this beautifully-decorated lintel with Vishnu atop Garuda, dated to the 9th century. A partial lintel with Garuda, may’ve also come from Kok Po and is dated to the end of the 9th century, currently residing at the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, USA. The National Museum in Phnom Penh holds a female deity (Ka.1857) which was found in May 1950 by curator Jean Boisselier and arrived at the museum in April 1952.Search....From...https://www.facebook.com/andy.brouwer.71
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