Naga (Serpent Divinity) (300s CE): Art, History and Details

Naga (Serpent Divinity) (300s CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The coils of a serpent's body and the bottle of water in his hand confirm the identity of this figure as a water serpent divinity called a naga. Nagas continue to be important divinities in local piety, for they control the forces of water, essential for prosperity.

Object facts

• Title: Naga (Serpent Divinity)
• Date: 300s CE
• Culture: India, Mathura, Kushan period
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: sandstone
• Dimensions: Overall: 67.3 cm (26 1/2 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Kushan, Mathura
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1943.661

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Codrington, Kenneth de Burgh, and William Rothenstein. Ancient India from the Earliest Times to the Guptas with Notes on the Architecture and Sculpture of the Mediæval Period. London: E. Benn, Limited, 1926.
• Hollis, Howard. “Three Indian Buddhist Sculptures.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 31, no. 3, 1944, pp. 33–37.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.

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.