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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

Unknown

1560

unspecified

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Mughal Painting Renaissance Renaissance

Dominant colour

The merchant has the hateful skull ground and put into a box, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Twenty-third Night is a 1560 unspecified by Unknown, a Mughal Painting work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Unknown
When & what style?: 1560 · Mughal Painting
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

You see a merchant watching as a skull is ground to dust and sealed in a small yellow box. Workers kneel around him, their faces calm. The skull was said to have killed eighty men—and would kill eighty more. The merchant thought destroying it would stop fate. The warning was written right on the bone. This painting comes from a book of parrot tales made for Emperor Akbar’s court. To see more stories like this, look up Mughal India, court of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605).

The story of this work

Overview

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.