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Four seated Masters
c. 1450
- Medium
- Gum tempera and gold on cotton
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Overall: 57.7 x 52 cm (22 11/16 x 20 1/2 in.)
- Culture
- Central Tibet, Ngor monastery
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Indian and Southeast Asian Art
- Credit line
- Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Founders and prominent masters of the Sakya order of Buddhism in Tibet are featured in this painting as part of the lineage of teachers who transmitted knowledge of their fundamental text, the Hevajra Tantra. It is part of a series of paintings made at one of the main Sakya monastic centers, which had close ties with Nepal. This Tibetan artwork includes Nepalese features, such as the delicate, decorative quality of the painting, its two-dimensionality, the exaggerated curvature of the upper eyelid, and the filling of all spaces with scrollwork.
