Seated Amitayus Buddha (c. 570s): Art, History and Details

Seated Amitayus Buddha (c. 570s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Amitayus, the Buddha of Infinite Life, is seated in meditation on a double lotus pedestal. The pedestal was not made with the statue but the combination is faithful to the original artistic conception. The statue is an extremely rare example of a major type of Northern Qi Buddhist sculpture. The heavy, massive front highlights the sense of monumentality and the spiritual essence of the Buddha. Today the sculpture is united with a pedestal that exhibits the rich, ornate style of early Tang sculpture. It was commissioned by the Duke of Liang, Fang Xuanling (578–648), for the blessing of his second son and daughter-in-law, the Tang imperial princess of Gaoyang. The iconography and inscription suggest that it originally went with a statue, now missing, of Shakyamuni, the historical Buddha, instead of Amitayus.

Object facts

• Title: Seated Amitayus Buddha
• Date: c. 570s
• Culture: China, Northern Qi dynasty (550–577)
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: marble
• Dimensions: Overall: 110 x 66.1 cm (43 5/16 x 26 in.)
• Collection: China - Southern Dynasties
• Department: Chinese Art
• Accession number: 1915.334.1

A detail from the museum

The stringlike folds of the Buddha's draperies emphasize his monumental, rigidly erect torso and tubular limbs.

Collection credit

Worcester R. Warner Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Sizer, Theodore. “A Note on Two Pieces of Chinese Sculpture in the Worcester R. Warner Collection.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 12, no. 2 (February 1925): 23–26.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1925.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1928.

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.