Mary ascends the stairs to the temple, from a Mirror of Holiness (Mir’at al-quds) of Father Jerome Xavier (1602–4): Art, History and Details

Mary ascends the stairs to the temple, from a Mirror of Holiness (Mir’at al-quds) of Father Jerome Xavier (1602–4) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Three-year-old Mary bounds up the stairs of the temple, eager to begin her education. Onlookers gesture in surprise. In the background the rocks have been cleverly shaded to look like faces—a Persian technique of visual double-entendre that the Mughals admired and adopted. This work is the second of the 27 surviving paintings made for this manuscript. The first, a scene of Mary’s birth, is in a private collection in Europe. Mary’s face had been painted with a fragile white paint, which has fallen off. Now only the underdrawing remains visible.

Object facts

• Title: Mary ascends the stairs to the temple, from a Mirror of Holiness (Mir’at al-quds) of Father Jerome Xavier
• Date: 1602–4
• Culture: Mughal India, Allahabad, made for Prince Salim (1569–1627)
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: Gum tempera, ink, color, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Page: 26.2 x 15.5 cm (10 5/16 x 6 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2005.145.9.a

A detail from the museum

Mary’s instructor awaits her, book in hand, at the top of a temple of learning.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

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.