Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
Shiva and His Followers Return to Mount Kailash (verso), from a Romance of Chandrabhanu and Lavanyavati of Upendra Bhanja (1670–1740)
1700s
- Medium
- gum tempera and lampblack on palm leaf
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Leaf: 5.1 x 41 cm (2 x 16 1/8 in.)
- Culture
- Eastern India, Odisha (formerly Orissa)
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Indian and Southeast Asian Art
- Credit line
- Purchase and partial gift from the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection; Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
At left is a multicolored mountain, labeled by an inscription in the local language of Oriya as a “cave on Kailash,” the Himalayan abode of the god Shiva and his wife Parvati. The cave with its bed and bolsters is empty, but the god is returning home on his bull, Nandi. The wilderness is indicated by the variety of trees, birds, and spotted deer.
This illustrated leaf is from a book that would have been stacked and bound by a string through the hole in the center. The lines were etched with a stylus into the palm leaf. Black soot from butter lamps was rubbed over the page and wiped off, leaving only the grooves black. Afterward, artists added color using a brush.
