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Album of Daoist and Buddhist Themes: Search the Mountain: Leaf 49

Unknown

1204

unspecified

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Ming Painting Medieval Mythology

Dominant colour

Album of Daoist and Buddhist Themes: Search the Mountain: Leaf 49 is a 1204 unspecified by Unknown, a Ming Painting work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Unknown
When & what style?: 1204 · Ming Painting
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

You see a tiny, crowded scene: soldiers in armor hack at demons with spears and swords while a god in blue robes watches from above. The mountain is a tangle of sharp lines and swirling clouds. This is one page from a 50-leaf training album. Artists in the 1200s used it like a textbook—copying the figures to learn how to paint gods and monsters for temple walls. The detail is so fine you can count the scales on a demon’s back. Look up more about china, southern song dynasty (1127-1279) to see how these small sheets trained generations of painters.

The story of this work

Overview

This extraordinary album has 50 paintings on a variety of religious subjects. They were likely created by several master craftsmen to share with studio apprentices as models for fulfilling commissions. The Jade Emperor and the Daoist pantheon make up the first 26 leaves. The next 14 leaves portray the Buddhist Ten Kings of Hell administering punishments to the dead. The third section, called “Clearing the Mountains,” features divine soldiers, led presumably by the deity Erlang Shen 二郎神, fighting undesirable creatures.