The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception
Not on view
Chinese ivory carvers in the Philippines made a specialty of small-scale devotional sculptures for export to Spain and Spanish America. Owned by clerics as well as lay people, works like this one were prized as both exotic curiosities and sacred images. Ivory figures of Guanyin, the Buddhist bodhisattva of infinite compassion, were often mistaken for the Virgin Mary and exported to the West. The earliest European accounts of China often cite them as evidence of the historical presence of Christians there.
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