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The merchant has the hateful skull ground and put into a box, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Twenty-third Night
c. 1560
- Medium
- gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Overall: 20.3 x 14 cm (8 x 5 1/2 in.); Painting only: 10.5 x 10.2 cm (4 1/8 x 4 in.)
- Culture
- Mughal India, court of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Indian and Southeast Asian Art
- Credit line
- Gift of Mrs. A. Dean Perry
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its subject is for older viewers (war, death, the Passion, drink or the like). How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
A small, yellow box rests on the ground in the center foreground of the image. Inside are the remains of a skull inscribed with a warning that it had caused the death of eighty men and would cause the death of eighty more. The merchant, on the left, had the skull destroyed, unaware that his actions could not circumvent fate.
