Male Atlantean figure (c. 300 CE): Art, History and Details

Male Atlantean figure (c. 300 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The musculature, thick curly locks of hair, and deeply inset eyes of this fragmentary figure show the sculptor's incorporation of Greco-Roman forms. His hunched posture suggests that he supported a heavy weight, such as the dome of a stupa on his back. Rows of figures would have visually supported the stupa, in which relics of the Buddha or other revered Buddhist leader were interred.

Object facts

• Title: Male Atlantean figure
• Date: c. 300 CE
• Culture: Afghanistan, Hadda
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: stucco
• Dimensions: Overall: 19.4 cm (7 5/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Kushan, Gandhara
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1969.64

A detail from the museum

Most sculptures from Hadda are preserved in museums, since the site was razed in 2001.

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. "The Year in Review for 1969." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 57, no. 1 (January 1970): 2-50.
• "Art of Asia Recently Acquired by American Museums, 1969." Archives of Asian Art 24 (1970): 86-117.
• Czuma, Stanislaw J., and Rekha Morris. Kushan Sculpture: Images from Early India. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1985.

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.