Miniature Votive Stupa (435 CE): Art, History and Details

Miniature Votive Stupa (435 CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This sutra pillar, inscribed with a sacred Buddhist text, belongs to a group of miniature stupas (jingta) that were found exclusively in the Gansu corridor, Northwest China. Ranging in date between AD 426–36, some of them bear the names of the lay Buddhist donors who commissioned them. A stupa is an architectural round structure built for the veneration of Buddhist relics. Miniature stupas may have commemorated the visit of a sacred site or represented donations to religious communities and sites.

Object facts

• Title: Miniature Votive Stupa
• Date: 435 CE
• Culture: China, Gansu province, Northern Wei dynasty (386-534)
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: steatite
• Dimensions: Overall: 16.9 cm (6 5/8 in.)
• Collection: China - Northern Dynasties
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1990.84

A detail from the museum

There are trigrams, three horizontal lines, broken or continuous, above each of the eight bodhisattvas in the stupa's lower section.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Wilson, J. Keith. "Notable Acquisitions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 78, no. 3 (1991): 63-147.
• Wilson, J. Keith, and Anne E. Wardwell. "New Objects/New Insights: Cleveland's Recent Chinese Acquisitions." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 81, no. 8 (1994): 270-347.
• Perkins, Larry David, Michael J. Bennett, Oleg Grabar, Robin Poynor, Dorothy C. Wong, and Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie. Intimate Rituals and Personal Devotions: Spiritual Art Through the Ages. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida, Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, 2000.

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.