Double-Faced Crossbar from a Railing (c. 150 BCE): Art, History and Details

Double-Faced Crossbar from a Railing (c. 150 BCE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This lens-shaped section of a crossbar is from one of the the earliest known Buddhist monuments in India to be embellished with stone relief carvings. It is from a circular fence that surrounded a stupa and demarcated the sacred space from the outside world.

Object facts

• Title: Double-Faced Crossbar from a Railing
• Date: c. 150 BCE
• Culture: India, Madhya Pradesh, Bharhut, Shunga period
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: plum-colored sandstone
• Dimensions: Overall: 55.9 x 66 cm (22 x 26 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Sunga, Bharhut
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1982.44

Collection credit

The Severance and Greta Millikin Purchase Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Pal, Pratapaditya. The Sensuous Immortals: A Selection of Sculptures from the Pan-Asian Collection. Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1977.
• Lee, Sherman E. "Year in Review for 1982." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 70, no. 1 (1983): 3-55.
• Clarke, Victoria. Flower: Exploring the World in Bloom. London; New York : Phaidon Press Limited, 2020.

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.