Bodhisattva Guanyin (late 500s–early 600s): Art, History and Details

Bodhisattva Guanyin (late 500s–early 600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

The artistic excellence of this bodhisattva is further reinforced by comparable outstanding Chinese Buddhist sculptures excavated at Qingzhou in Shandong Province in 1996—one of the most sensational and significant archaeological finds of the 1900s. Like related types among the Qingzhou finds, this statute has a gently smiling face and meticulous detailing of splendid jewelry. A noticeable difference, however, is the unique yingluo 瓔珞 (mukt hara) worn by the bodhisattva for personal adornment. The somewhat bizarre but imaginative combination of a string of jewels with grotesque animal masks, flying apsara, jade pendants, dragons, and metal ornaments was probably a regional decorative style of Shanxi Province.

Object facts

• Title: Bodhisattva Guanyin
• Date: late 500s–early 600s
• Culture: China, late Northern Qi (550–577) or early Sui dynasty (581–618)
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: sandstone with polychromy
• Dimensions: Overall: 138.8 x 38.2 x 27.4 cm (54 5/8 x 15 1/16 x 10 13/16 in.)
• Collection: China - Sui Dynasty
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1962.162

A detail from the museum

The carved and painted back suggest that the bodhisattva was originally displayed where it could be viewed in the round.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1966. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1966.
• Ho, Wai-Kam. “Three Seated Stone Buddhas.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 53, no. 4 (April 1966): 84–102.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1969. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1969.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.