Returned to lender The Met accepts temporary loans of art both for short-term exhibitions and for long-term display in its galleries.
Buddha granting boons
India, Buddham (Buddhapad), Gunter District, Andhra Pradesh
Not on view
The production of cast-metal images marked a new stage in Buddhist devotional practice. Rituals and texts for their care and worship became regular features of monastic life by the middle of the first millennium. This bronze Buddha represents the later development of Deccan Buddhist imagery, which grew stylistically out of the stone sculpting tradition. This is seen in the body’s symmetrical frontality and the drapery’s curvilinear folds. A Buddha in The Met collection (1998.414) has traces of an inscription on the pedestal that names a monastery—otherwise unrecorded—and a donor. The script firmly dates this icon to the fifth-century Deccan, in all likelihood the Andhra territories.