Mary ascends the stairs to the temple, from a Mirror of Holiness (Mir’at al-quds) of Father Jerome Xavier
Unknown Artist
1602–4
Medium
Gum tempera, ink, color, and gold on paper
Dimensions
painting only: 22.6 × 10.1 cm · page: 26.2 × 15.5 cm
Classification
Manuscript
Department
Indian and Southeast Asian Art
Museum
Cleveland Museum of Art
Credit
John L. Severance Fund
Accession Number
2005.145.9.a
About this artwork
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 falle...