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The forty wives and their secret paramours being punished by stoning to death, 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: 8.7 x 10 cm (3 7/16 x 3 15/16 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
The Raja’s wives have been hiding forty young men dressed as women in their chambers. When their amorous affairs were revealed, all eighty were killed. Their deaths fulfilled an old prophecy written on a mysterious skull. The Raja’s men stand on the edges of the composition, hurling stones into the pile of intertwined bodies.
